The wireless carnival comes to town

Today the sprawling California State Fair opens in Sacramento and Bil Lowry will be watching a key part of it – the carnival midway operation -- through a set of computer screens monitoring a Wi-Fi mesh network.

The portable backbone network, which is often lashed into place using plastic zipties, is based on Firetide Networks’ wireless LAN mesh nodes. It links some 300 Motorola handheld scanners and point-of-sale terminals to the midway’s electronic ticketing, warehousing and time-card applications. It also interconnects other corporate applications and databases on Microsoft Windows servers and PCs in the mobile trailers that serve as the working, living, dining and sleeping quarters for 500 permanent and temporary workers.

“It’s kind of an ‘ER’ approach to networking,” Lowry says, describing a unique, high-pressure, fast-moving network. The permanent, four-person IT staff, augmented by four to six temporary workers culled from the local Craigslist, literally has tossed the wireless LAN documentation onto a shelf and left it there.

Watch a slideshow from the carnival.

Lowry is the director of IT and marketing technologies for Ray Cammack Shows (RCS), which claims to be the largest carnival company in the United States. Nominally headquartered in Laveen, Ariz., near Phoenix, RCS is actually a traveling corporation for most of the year: A convoy of 80 trucks moves from site to site everything it needs, including ride machinery, equipment, employees, a complete IT infrastructure, a commissary, a hair salon and a warehouse-in-a-tent that stocks hundreds of thousands of toys and prizes for carnival attendees.

Lowry and his staff call the first-day opening of each venue “the launch.”

“It really is like launching a rocket: it’s rough, noisy, chaotic,” he says. The push-to-talk radios are alive with chatter, complaints, problem reports, confusion and questions, and the net traffic load swells as the midway throngs with fun seekers lining up for games and rides, including the 12-story Le Grande Wheel, the biggest mobile Ferris wheel in the county (it takes up 18 semi-trailer loads by itself).

Everyone knows when the network “achieves orbit.” “You go from constant chatter, to suddenly it’s quiet,” Lowry says. “And you’re sailing. We can go days without any tech support problems.”

The Sacramento network was put together in about 72 hours. Just days earlier, the carnival operation had dismantled itself in Costa Mesa, Calif., where RCS provided the midway attractions for the Orange County Fair. Since first setting up a Firetide mesh on a small test event last November, Lowry’s team has honed their deployment skills.

Arriving at a new site, the crew winches up a 65-foot portable tower, not far from the main IT server trailer. The height lets RCS shoot wireless signals nearly a half-mile away to the separate KidLand venue. The tower mounts four Firetide HotPort 3000 series outdoor nodes, with their directional patch antennas covering different areas of the midway site. A fifth node acts as a backup unit. The antenna gives a clear line of site to other Firetide nodes, mounted on metal poles usually attached to the numerous 8-by-9-foot metal ticket booths.