D-LINK® turns 700-acre farm into WI-FI® city for Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival

Network Solutions from D-Link Provide Event with High-Speed Wireless Internet Access for Staff, Artists and 90,000 Attendees.

FOUNTAIN VALLEY, Calif. — D-Link®, the end-to-end networking solutions provider for consumer and business, today announced it is providing high-speed wireless Internet infrastructure for the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival, held on 700 acres of farmland in Manchester, Tenn. In addition, D-Link is sponsoring a MediaLounge™ tent for the event, where attendees can access the Web and stay in touch with friends and family.

The Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival is a four-day, multi-stage camping festival held June 14 to 17 in a beautiful rural setting in Manchester, Tenn., 60 miles south of Nashville. Debuting in 2002, the festival draws some 90,000 visitors to celebrate and enjoy over 100 live music performances on 11 stages, a comedy theater, jazz club, disco, arcade, cinema, dance classes, art installations and a variety of cafes and restaurants.

For the Bonnaroo Festival, D-Link is serving as a corporate sponsor, providing all the equipment needed to set up a wide-reaching wireless network for the festival grounds and sponsoring the D-Link MediaLounge, a centrally-located communications tent outfitted with 25 computers where fans can go to access the Internet for free during the event.

“In its simplest form, we take 700 acres and create one of the largest independent temporary wireless infrastructures in the country,” said Chad Issaq, Director of Corporate Partnerships for Bonnaroo. “We build a city for 90,000 people on a farm where there is nothing but grass and hay. The Festival becomes the sixth largest city in Tennessee during the show.”

“We’re pleased to be able to contribute to this exciting project and provide the switching infrastructure and WLAN coverage needed to make this ambitious deployment a success,” said George Cravens, Technical Media Engineer, D-Link Systems, Inc. “We know that the Bonnaroo artists, staff and event goers rely heavily on Internet access and we are glad to offer support and fulfill that need.”

D-Link is supplying all of the Wi-Fi networking gear for the deployment, including Air Premier™ dual-band (802.11a/g) access points (AP), rugged weather-proof outdoor APs with internal temperature controls and D-Link xStack™ managed gigabit switches to run the backbone of the network. D-Link is also providing NetDefend™ firewalls to protect the network from outside intrusions and threats.

“We have called it ’agri-networking’ and that is a fairly accurate term. The 700-acre site was lit with more than 20 D-Link bridge links, providing stable and secure Internet coverage to approximately 50 office trailers and acres of open area,” Thomas Porter, Director of Bonnaroo Internet Operations said. “The D-Link gear serves every role in this extensive deployment, from head-end routing to Layer 2 switching to end-user access points.”

“We’d like to thank the folks at D-Link. They stepped up to provide Bonnaroo attendees with a cutting-edge high-tech network that enabled visitors to connect with each other and the outside world over a wireless Internet connection,” said Issaq. “Bonnaroo continues to be the most tech-savvy festival in the land, courtesy of D-Link.”

In the MediaLounge tent, visitors can learn more about D-Link Digital Home solutions, including home networking, the award-winning line of MediaLounge players designed to play and display digital music files, photos, movies and more on a television from any computer on a home network.

On display will be D-Link’s latest MediaLounge Wireless Media Player - DSM-510 - a powerful, yet compact high-definition media player optimized for users with Intel® Viiv™ technology-based PCs. Using the Intel Viiv technology verified DSM-510, consumers will get maximum enjoyment out of their digital home entertainment network, including access to the Intel Viiv Zone, which offers a growing selection of on-demand, Internet-delivered premium content, including movies, music videos, TV shows, and information services.

D-Link’s award-winning line of draft 802.11n networking solutions will also be on display, offering consumers best-in-class solutions to blanket their home with a strong wireless network signal.

D-Link will also be giving away CDs at the MediaLounge tent with free MP3s courtesy of partner Real Networks® and special offers on D-Link MediaLounge media players and Intel Viiv computers.