Howdy,

I trust Mark Malaska has filled you in on some IT crew background and our current list of priorities for the last few years. Basically that puts the vendors WiFi at the bottom of our list of things to work on. Even so, we do make some progress on the vendor network each year. Though Ice storms like the one this year undo some of that progress. I would even say that this year's ice storm caused more damage to the IT network, and perhaps the Communications crew's network than storms from other years. I spent about four hours canoeing around the site on Sunday Jan 28th, and found many downed lines, and several broken ones. Major, and minor. The backbone line to main camp had some trees fall on it and it may be damaged. Also the main CMTS line to Xavanadu was ripped in two, not to mention a couple of leaf node lines. Though some of our lines run through the woods not along any path, so I couldn't inspect those more problematic areas.

Snivel Smile
2

Dragon Plaza / feed to Xavanadu

Main Camp Data and Power to Fair Centrial

There is a future project taking shape to replace large parts of our water system, which has lots of support for laying a couple of empty conduits next to the water lines. This would be a great investment in the future of the fair, and would give us capacity to grow our infrastructure almost painlessly. It would probably eliminate most winter storm damage if we could get our infrastructure underground.

As many of you know we did a quick survey of the vendors experience using their WiFi network, which on the surface seemed to give discouraging results. I sorted the rows by booth number so you could see answers for adjacent booths, and also drew rough ellipsis on a peach pit with the areas of coverage (before the ice storm) which shows that roughly half the fair was covered. Mark has this info, maybe he can distribute it to anyone interested. This seems about right since the first mention of the CMTS project was in 2018's budget, so that's about 5 years ago, and I estimate we have about another five years till it's complete. Yes it's slow because we only get work done on it during the five or six weeks of prefair, and of course after all the other higher priorities that Mark enumerated are done.

Some of the survey results that caught my attention, were Booths getting poor service next to ones getting great service. Sometimes a booth would get service where their wasn't any. The "F" booths are stroling food booths and their level of sevice will depend on where they are. My take away is that we need to proactively put folks out in the field to work with the booth folks and see if their equipment is appropriate for our network and help them tune it up if we can. Of course the surveyors would bring their own devices and run some tests. We have done this informally in past years, but it's probably a good idea to get a couple of new crew members to work during the fair and talk to as many vendors as possible. This is big task, and Adam of Craft Inventory, has eight people doing their own surveys during the fair, I probably will be understaffed with just two but we could start there.

Another thing to consider is that as we rely more and more on internet out at the sticker booth, we may want to build a backup redundant connection out there. If the lines going out there which are normally just a few feet off the ground, could be pushed down by falling brush and then they are more exposed to an errant mower, or machete. At best it might take a couple of hours to fix, at worst four to six depending on the type of damage, brush cutting / lift work (near main camp) required, etc... If we had a backup connection, then the fix would be almost instantaneous. I would propose a wireless link for this backup connection.

Often my proposed projects are a little more than my crew can get done during pre-fair, In that case sometimes I just hold off on buying the parts. An example of this is the new UPS system for the Hub which was a project slated for last year that didn't get started. This is still critical infrastructure, but with all the repairs going on this year I don't see us getting to it, so I didn't include it in this years budget request. I also tried to trim down a few other nonesential things for this years cycle.

Communications Crew Lines

Booth 38

-- ClifCox - 30 Jan 2024