Music, data in the air at NYC concert hall

While transmitting voice and data across the country now seems almost trivial, sometimes communicating across the street is not. The managers of a new performance venue in Manhattan discovered this lesson when they attempted to link their facility to their administrative offices 150 ft down the block. With a fiber run practically impossible and a T1 line economically unsatisfactory, Jazz at Lincoln Center (JALC) decided to take to the air via a free-space optical link.

A nonprofit organization under the artistic direction of noted composer and musician Wynton Marsalis, JALC promotes the development and appreciation of jazz through concerts, educational programs, and other endeavors. The $128-million, 100,000-sq-ft Frederick P. Rose Hall, nestled on the fifth and sixth floors between the two towers that compose the Time Warner Center, hosts many of the performances that JALC sponsors and contains several performance spaces. As the hall approached completion last October, a way had to be found to connect it to the 100-Mbit/sec network running throughout JALC’s administrative offices down the street. Such a connection would enable staffers at the two locations to share an ArtsVision database, track-event ticketing, and communicate via email and voice over IP.

But according to JALC associate IT director Fred Murphy, those services initially proved easier to envision than to support. Murphy met with his technical team and first discussed running a fiber cable between the buildings. However, digging up a Manhattan street would be expensive and complicated, given the need for city approval, easements, etc. “I was just told to forget about it, basically,” Murphy recalls.

Murphy and company next considered a conventional T1 line, which would have engendered a monthly fee. A microwave link would avoid such fees, but JALC wasn’t sure how the organization’s patrons and concert-goers would feel about the presence of such equipment. “The perception of microwave is that it’s perhaps dangerous,” Murphy explains. “Whether that’s actually the case or not is something one could discuss, but we thought it might be a negative factor from that point of view.”

In a meeting with the building developers, a consultant mentioned that free-space optical systems linked his Manhattan offices. Murphy says he was only vaguely aware of the technology, so he did some investigating. He concluded that, compared to a microwave option, “it looked like you could get higher bandwidth, greater reliability, [and it would be] less affected by weather and conditions and so on.”

Murphy noticed that the free-space systems had achieved success in applications significantly tougher than his own. “A lot of the wireless optic solutions were typically running over distances of a mile or more. And whereas this is like a ridiculously short distance for an optical solution, it seemed like the reliability would just be really good,” he says.

Convinced that a free-space approach would meet his needs, Murphy worked with Verizon (a JALC patron that served as Rose Hall’s telecommunications contractor) to acquire two FlightLite Gigabit Ethernet optical wireless systems from LightPointe (San Diego). The two communications companies collaborated on the installation, with Verizon physically placing the devices in the two buildings and a LightPointe technician performing calibration.

The unit installed in the administrative offices on the 11th floor of 33 W. 60th Street was attached to a mast secured to the floor of an office. Its counterpart at Rose Hall was suspended via a mast from a ceiling in one of the hall’s back corridors. The units run on 20-A, 110-V current.

Murphy reports the installation went very smoothly. “The actual physical mounting and bringing it online was just about five hours maybe. It’s very simple,” he says.

It also appears to be effective. The optical wireless link provides 1.5-Gbit/sec capacity, more than enough to maintain the original 100-Mbit/sec data rates in both locations. “So far very good,” says Murphy. “The performance has been basically trouble-free since it went up in August.”

Stephen Hardyis the editorial director and associate publisher of Lightwave.