The Gardens of Unearthly Delights is a yearly feature of Rundle Park on Adelaide’s East Terrace. Coinciding with the Adelaide Fringe, the Gardens host productions from all around the world in temporary venues built within the beauty of Rundle Park. The whole site is transformed from a park to an event space in 2 and a half weeks. Requiring all infrastructure to be brought in and installed meeting council regulations. Event Systems approached the Gardens back in 2012 with the idea of providing communication services for the Event. An idea that started with just ticketing communication in mind with some internet distribution quickly evolved into a much larger operation.
By mid-January Event Systems was given the go ahead to provide Network infrastructure for the Ticketing System Provided by Red61 in the UK, Internet distribution, CCTV, Bar POS communications, VOIP Telephony, Traditional Radio Comms as well as support throughout the festival. Prior to the green light, Event Systems had already approached local ISP, Adam Internet to supply a high speed symmetric connection to the site. Eventually all parties came to the table and a 40Mbit SHDSL line was commissioned to an existing structure on the site. An additional ADSL2+ connection was provided in case the primary connection failed.
Due to the size of the site as well as the fact that most of it is covered with trees, a number of methods were employed to distribute connectivity across the site. A 400 meter 20-Pair cable was flown down the length of the site. This cable brought SHDSL to the production compound conveniently located at the opposite end of the site to where the services were able to be provisioned, as well as VDSL2 Ethernet links back to each box office located onsite. It was decided early on that critical infrastructure like this would use copper connectivity due to the dense foliage onsite providing connectivity concerns. Early onsite tests proved that this concern was largely unfounded.
The remainder of the connectivity requirements were achieved with Ubiquiti networks wireless links. a 12m tower was erected in the production compound and fitted with 3 90 degree sectors operating in the 5GHz band. Overlapped to improve capacity, the sectors which were attached to Ubiquiti Rocket M radios provided excellent coverage and throughput to 80% of the site, despite dense foliage and a high -70 noise floor while the carnival rides were in operation. Surprisingly latency and jitter remained excellent throughout the festival, with minimal maintenance required to achieve sub 20ms RTT and less then 4ms deviation while under normal operation.
The gardens had 3 Box Offices located onsite. One main location at the front entry and two satellite box offices located inside. Each location was provided with internet access and VOIP communications as well as secure access to the ticketing server located in the comms office. The VDSL2 links performed flawlessly for the month of operation, providing a solid 40mb link on the longest run of 350m. Backup links were provided by RF connectivity just in case the main cable failed or if the VDSL2 solution had issues.
14 cameras were provided for key points of interest around the site. 12 of the cameras were Ubiquiti Aircams which provided excellent quality video in a very cost effective package. 2 additional Axis Q6034-E HD domes were supplied to cover the busy areas of the site. Providing 1280×720 streams and 18x optical zoom, the cameras proved invaluable for keeping an eye on situation as they occurred. 9 days of footage at 25fps was recorded from the cameras via the ExacQ Vision platform running solely on a Dell R710 with 5TB of local storage. Police were able to retrieve footage from the system in the event of any issues onsite. Remote view capabilities were provided to the security firm as well as Event manager and producers both onsite and off via external connectivity.
Telephony services were provided for the production compound, box offices and key Bar locations. The phone system proved invaluable over the run of the event, processing in excess of 1000 calls. Handsets provided were Yealink T2x series and connected via direct Ethernet in the production compound, to a combination or wireless and VDSL links in the field. An elastix pbx provided call routing and voicemail facilities to the whole system as well as outbound call capability via a MyNetFone SIP trunk. The entire network was QOS aware and this ensured that despite some links were being utilised heavily, call quality was not reduced. All phones had external DID’s for convenience.
Event Systems provided the connectivity required to run the bar POS system that had been purchased by the producers of the event. 11 of the sites 13 bars were connected to the POS system which required low latency connectivity due to its constant reliance on the database server located in the main compound.
In addition to the network services provided, Event Systems also supplied 60 Motorola GP338 handheld radios as well as accessories for use by staff during the construction and festival period. Wireless access to the network was provided for staff in key areas as well as basic print and file share services. The operation of the network was monitored 24/7 with ICINGA and Smokeping monitoring agents to ensure that issues were resolved quickly and that failures could be analysed and then prevented in the future.
All up the following equipment was supplied.
- 1x Dell R710 – Server 2008 R2 running CCTV
- 1x Dell R520 – Server 2012 Standard running network services, PBX and monitoring within Hyper-V
- 1x Mikrotik CCR1036
- 4x Cisco SG300-28P switches
- 3x Cisco 2960 Switches
- 10x Netgear GS108T
- 20x Yealink IP Phone
- 3x Ubiquiti Rocket M 5Ghz Radios
- 3x Ubiquiti Sector Antennas
- 30x Ubiquiti Nanostation 5GHz
- 12x Ubiquiti Aircam
- 2x Axis Q6034-E Dome PTZ
- 3x VDSL2 Ethernet extender pairs
- 6x Mikrotik RB750UP
- 4x Mikrotik RB951-2n
- 2x Aruba instant AP 105
- 1x Eaton 5PX 1500VA UPS
- 4x Eaton 3S 500VA UPS
- 60x Gp338 Motorola radios
- 3Km Cat5e Cabling
[slideshow_deploy id=’849′]
