As a director of communications, Frank Basso brings this historic raceway into the VoIP and Wi-Fi fast lanes.
Laguna Seca’s network hot shot.
Frank Basso loves life in the fast lane. As assistant director of communications for Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, his need for speed is amply met. Fast racetrack. Fast wireless network.
Basso, 33, is a linebacker-sized man who talks in the easygoing Southern California speech of the Malibu beaches where he grew up. But underneath his laid-back exterior is a guy on a serious mission. He is creating a state-of-the-art network that will enable a historic racetrack to carry on as an international venue.
“I came here during a race, and I’ve been here ever since,” says Basso, who is both a volunteer and a paid contractor for the track’s management organization, the Sports Car Racing Association of the Monterey Peninsula (SCRAMP). While he spends all of his vacation time and a good chunk of his weekends helping SCRAMP organize races, this isn’t his day job. He also is the director of operations for e-mail security start-up ProofPoint.
VoIP in a hurry
Basso’s Laguna Seca story begins two years ago, when SCRAMP won the contract to host the Red Bull U.S. Grand Prix, billed as the largest motorcycle race in North America. Including the Grand Prix, SCRAMP runs five major annual international events (though the venue is rented out year-round to the Skip Barber Racing School and myriad other event organizers). As part of the Grand Prix contract, Laguna Seca had to provide 500 phone lines throughout its 542-acre site. The requirement wasn’t out of line. But because the mostly volunteer-run SCRAMP had been operating the track as a nonprofit since 1957, its network technology had fallen dangerously behind.
No matter how beloved the track, “teams wouldn’t ship $250 million worth of equipment from Europe to race without a phone,” Basso says. Moreover, network failures during international races carry with them a painful fine, as much as $250,000 per outage. Plus the venue’s archaic, UHF radio and paper-based systems for operating concessions meant lost revenue from the 60,000 fans a day.
“They used paper systems, as they just did not have the technology or network to support anything else. During events, they carried cash registers on golf carts back to the office to download daily totals, often causing damage or loss of data,” Basso recalls.
SCRAMP originally asked the local RBOC to install the phone lines. But Laguna Seca is located in relative nowhere, some 10 miles east of Monterey, Calif., (secluded enough to be home to a 250-site campground). The RBOC didn’t have enough telephone facilities to provide the lines.
When it became apparent that the lines wouldn’t be installed in time, one of the fiber contractors working for the phone company suggested that SCRAMP contact Basso, his friend. Basso’s résumé consists of a string of complex security and network design jobs. He’s worked for a government contract security firm, a streaming data router start-up, an ISP, an international wireless location-based service provider and a multiplayer gaming company, to name a few.
Basso, a car racer himself, relished Laguna Seca’s technology challenge and his newfound access to the world-famous, 2.2-mile course. “I’m notorious for taking rental cars around the track,” he says with a grin.
The SCRAMP communication team knew it wanted to implement VoIP for the needed phone lines. With Basso on board, they completed the project on time, installing 15 miles of fiber-optic cabling, 11 fiber points of presence, 10 miles of copper cabling and capacity for 1,500 VoIP lines, including analog adapters. He brought in a DS-3 microwave backhaul link from his former ISP employer, Internet Connections (where Basso still serves on the board) – which required linking to a line-of-sight dish on a hillside 9 miles away on Mount Toro. (An eventual second circuit will link the microwave network to San Jose, via a dish 60 miles away at Loma Prieta Peak.) He scoured the property for places he could stuff a wiring closet to house Cisco routers and VoIP gear, converting old wooden shacks and janitorial storage units alike.
You in action: Click here to watch Frank Basso, assistant director of communications for Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca, tell you about his job.
Even so, the amount of work involved in setting up VoIP for each race is mind-boggling. Phone lines serve the racing teams, the media, concession-stand vendors, hospitality suites and anyone else who needs a phone on race day.
But every event uses the facility space differently – each a unique city of mobile tents and trailers. Basso cannot install permanent Ethernet jacks, as vendors may wind up several feet away from the jack. Each race requires months of planning. Immediately before an event, a team of volunteers will spend three or so days building the network.
“My least favorite part of the job is getting ready for a race when it’s raining, and we’re pulling cable in the mud to get to a vendor,” he says. “But we’re done when race day starts. We get to sit out in the communication tower and watch the race.” They also monitor the network with tools such as CiscoWorks and open source Nagios.
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Wireless by design
Comprehensive high-speed Internet access was an even bigger technical challenge than voice. Basso needed to cover the paddock, garages, hospitality suites and outlying areas. Digging up the track to lay more fiber wasn’t feasible, especially because many of the buildings on-site are temporary structures. Wireless was the obvious solution.
You in action: Click here watch Frank Basso, assistant director of communications for Mazda Raceway Laguna Seca tell you about his job.
But unlike oval-shaped NASCAR tracks, Laguna Seca is an 11-turn road course on rolling hills. The track travels under five bridges and covers 350 feet of elevation changes. Basso couldn’t just point all the wireless access points into an oval center and call it good. With the help of a wireless network design firm, the communications team placed access points in the logical spots necessary for a mesh network. But race cars also use Wi-Fi for their onboard telemetry. Every time a car sped by, it caused so much noise on the 2.4GHz frequency that the access points dropped their Wi-Fi connections. Several seconds were required for them to find their way back online, only to have another car whiz by and knock them off again.
“We ended up with unhappy, frustrated customers, vendors, race teams and media,” he says of the initial wireless network.
Rogue access points caused another problem. Every team would throw its own access point online for legitimate reasons, and then use it to steal a competitor’s secret telemetry and vehicle configuration information.
In search of a solution to the problem of rogue access points, Basso contacted Trapeze Networks, a company he knew through ProofPoint. Using its MP-620 outdoor 802.11a and 802.11b/g access points, Trapeze helped Basso design a pico cell wireless network. Each cell covers about a 300-foot zone, which Basso jokes is what the original 802.11 specification supports. By carefully tilting each access point at the right angle so that the pico cell did not fall subject to interference, the wireless network, which went live in February, has remained reliable.
Trapeze also designed special environmental enclosures for its access points. For example, wall-mounted access points in the garages are enclosed in filtered, fire-resistant boxes, which protect them from dirt, fuel, fumes and chemicals. All access points use Power over Ethernet.
Trapeze’s multitenant function stops the rogues. Teams must use the venue’s network. Each team receives a Trapeze access point and its own identity by which it safely tunnels through the wireless network.
Basso now is turning his attention to other technology needs. This month his team brought online a point-of-sale system using Microsoft Retail Management System. Voice over wireless also is on Basso’s list.
All of the labor has immense rewards, he says. “This job is instant gratification. We turn the network on, and everything works and everyone is happy. It’s an environment where we are moving from zero to Mach 1 overnight.”
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