Glastonbury Festival goes wireless

[oceanhippie]

Pier To Pier has been working with the organisers of the Glastonbury Festival to bring wireless internet provison to arround the site for this years festival. Exact details are yet to be worked out. But we will be providing outdoor access, similar to our outdoor coverage on the beach.

Tom working on a test anntenna, Pyramid Stage visible int the background

A detailed press release should follow soon.

[rawmusic]

Just wondering how much of the site is likely to be covered? I've used the brighton node a few times when working on conferences in the nearby hotels.
now I'm at glastonbury and you're putting up coverage there.
Lovely.

[oceanhippie]

The place is huge, I mean big. Ther'll be 4 beach style anntennas arround. Pyramid Stage, and one over at Greenfields (probably tell you tomorrow. And another 1.

Other access points / rnage extenders will be arround where approariate, Mide you a drive arround with netstumbler pulled in a fair few other access points.

Access is available now in my tent......

Ok near The Dance area, the interactive cafe

[daveph]

Nice work guys.

Have fun.

[rawmusic]

Well I guess I'll find out tomorrow, I'm working on the ourdoor theatre stage and camping behind the cabaret tent, hopefully I'll get a connection i've got net stumbler and a 2.5db mag mount I'll see what happens.

Phil

[daveph]

According to the guys on site, coverage is near the pyramid stage, somewhere in the greenfields, and probably the engine shed. If that means anything to anyone. But they are still working on it, having got a  802.11a long-haul working yesterday, before an antenna got misaligned...

[adelayde]

I have to point out that Glastonbury already went wireless in 2003 and did this year as well in the Lost Vagueness area.  I am from Psand.net and we've been providing the festival for a couple of years with wireless access and streaming, we use a satellite dish for Internet access, the same as they used this year on the main stage, in fact we did this a couple of years back, but for LV rather than the Pyramid Stage due to some rather unfortunate shenanigans with the 'Internet co-ordinator'.  Nice work guys for doing what you've done, but I just wanted to set the record straight as it appears from the title of the post that this was the first time it was done, when in actual fact it wasn't.  Hope the N connectors solved the problems.

[John_C_Scott]

I believe that Greenpeace ran a free wireless access point in 2000 2 & 3. As you know I did everything I could to promote the psands.net idea but it simply wasn't possible to get anyone to dig their hand in their pocket and come up with the money they wanted and it really wasn't for a want of trying. But I'm really glad that they're sorted out in LV. I think the point is that this network linked more than one area at the festival.

[Alex_Studd]

I guess the point that should have been made was about the plan to create the GAN, or Glastonbury Area Network as i seem to remember claiming at about 3 in the morning round the campfire. A wireless network linking the various areas at Glastonbury would allow content and communications to be shared around the site without having to push everything out to the Internet and then drag it back. In that respect we had partial success, helped a number of people out, provided a link for all the journolists that didn't have access to the ADSL lines around site after the storm disrupted the Interstage area, learnt a lot and will be better prepared next time.

Hats off to psands for kicking wireless access at the festival off and I'm sure we all agree the more access to IP at the festival the better, just don't try explaining why it's such a good thing at 3 in the morning around a campfire

:)