The sound of (wireless) music

By Ellen Messmer, NetworkWorld.com, 11/01/04

Wireless LANs are quietly moving into every corner of American life -- coffee shops, airports, home offices and corporate suites -- so why should we be surprised to see the WLAN access point appear in classical-music concert halls, too? And so it has at Walt Disney Concert Hall, the new home of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, where wireless access is provided in the orchestra lounge, conference room, board room and the performers’ practice rooms and dressing rooms.

Jeff Matchan, the IT director for the L.A. Philharmonic Association, says the wireless access points from Enterasys were installed late last year as part of the overall intranet for the new concert hall, a spectacular edifice designed by architect Frank Gehry.

Matchan said one reason wireless went into the dressing rooms is because the performing artists and accompanying personnel on tour sometimes come in with laptops and want to get access to the Internet as a visitor. The challenge was finding a way their 802.11b-enabled wireless laptops could get to the wider Internet through the concert hall’s intranet but remain restricted from internal computer resources.

“We wanted to give them access to the Internet but not anything else,” says Matchan. “For instance, we didn’t want them to see a server on the network but we did want to pass the Web traffic to them.” The IT department at the Philharmonic also wanted to do this without having to force the visitor to authenticate with a password.

After an evaluation process last year, the L.A. Philharmonic ended up going with a security approach that entails using Enterasys switches that push down a temporary IP address to the wireless laptop when it’s being used near the Enterasys wireless access point. The visitor is allowed on the intranet but only gains use of the concert hall’s Internet access.

The WLAN access for visiting artists has worked well so far, says Matchan, and has been easy to manage. A year ago during the evaluation stage, the L.A. Philharmonic tested similar approaches suggested by Cisco and Hewlett-Packard for restricting WLAN access but felt the administration was a somewhat harder.

The other use of wireless in the concert hall is with ticket scanners, which share information with a server in the box office so that the concert hall can determine if there’s any difference between the number of tickets sold to subscribers with season tickets and the number who show up for each concert.

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