FOUNTAIN VALLEY, CA (CelebrityAccess MediaWire) — D-Link, a networking solutions provider for consumer and business, announced it is providing high-speed wireless Internet infrastructure for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, held on 700 acres of farmland in Manchester, Tenn. In addition, D-Link is sponsoring a MediaLounge tent for the event, where attendees can access the Web and stay in touch with friends and family.
For the Bonnaroo Festival, D-Link is serving as a corporate sponsor, providing all the equipment needed to set up a wide-reaching wireless network for the festival grounds and sponsoring the D-Link MediaLounge, a centrally- located communications tent outfitted with 25 computers where fans can go to access the Internet for free during the event.
"In its simplest form, we take 700 acres and create one of the largest independent temporary wireless infrastructures in the country," said Chad Issaq, Director of Corporate Partnerships for Bonnaroo. "We build a city for 90,000 people on a farm where there is nothing but grass and hay. The Festival becomes the sixth largest city in Tennessee during the show."
"We are pleased to be able to contribute to this exciting project and provide the switching infrastructure and WLAN coverage needed to make this ambitious deployment a success," said George Cravens, Technical Media Engineer, D-Link Systems, Inc. "We know that the Bonnaroo artists, staff and event-goers rely heavily on Internet access and we are glad to offer support and fulfill that need."
D-Link is supplying all of the Wi-Fi networking gear for the deployment, including Air Premier(TM) dual-band (802.11a/g) access points (AP), rugged weather-proof outdoor APs with internal temperature controls and D-Link xStack(TM) managed gigabit switches to run the backbone of the network. D-Link is also providing NetDefend(TM) firewalls to protect the network from outside intrusions and threats.
"We have called it 'agri-networking' and that is a fairly accurate term. The 700-acre site was lit with more than 20 D-Link bridge links, providing stable and secure Internet coverage to approximately 50 office trailers and acres of open area," Thomas Porter, Director of Bonnaroo Internet Operations said. "The D-Link gear serves every role in this extensive deployment, from head-end routing to Layer 2 switching to end-user access points."
"We'd like to thank the folks at D-Link. They stepped up to provide Bonnaroo attendees with a cutting-edge high-tech network that enabled visitors to connect with each other and the outside world over a wireless Internet connection," said Issaq. "Bonnaroo continues to be the most tech-savvy festival in the land, courtesy of D-Link."
