Subject: [NEXTEL-1] Wiring a Convention, Version 2004- Real Wireless Enforcement- We even took down Nextel! Timmy How Ya Like Me Now?

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 29 Jul 2004 13:28:08 -0400

Wiring a Convention, Version 2004- Real Wireless Enforcement- We even
took down Nextel! Timmy How Ya Like Me Now?

Posted on July 29, 2004

By SETH SCHIESEL
New York Times

BOSTON, July 28 - With the Democratic delegates in session below and
giant red, white and blue sausages of balloons swaying above, Louis
Libin has spent much of this week perched near the roof of the
FleetCenter, binoculars to his eyes, scanning the crowd for evildoers.

Level 9, where Mr. Libin operates, is more heavily secured than the
convention floor and houses vital security operations. But Mr. Libin is
not a Secret Service agent. He is not a police officer. Instead, the
badge hanging from his neck reads Wireless Enforcement.

Mr. Libin runs the convention's wireless coordination committee, and he
enforces his own brand of zero-tolerance justice. Armed with advanced
detection equipment, Mr.  Libin maintains a lookout for radio pirates.

With so many wireless cameras and microphones, so many walkie-talkies,
so many cellphones and so many law-enforcement agencies, "this is
probably the busiest, noisiest radio frequency environment on the planet
right now," said Mr. Libin, a 45-year-old technology consultant from
Woodmere, N.Y. "We've been working for months on a plan to divide up the
frequencies, and if someone is not complying with the plan, we have to
shut them down."

In terms of technology, a political convention is rivaled in complexity
perhaps only by the Olympics. And with the march of digital technology,
past experience offers only a partial road map. After all, just four
years ago almost no one had even heard of Wi-Fi.

"The convention in 2000 was different because there were so many new
options, this whole dot-com barrage, and no one knew what they really
wanted," said Christopher Gruin, the convention's technology director.
"This time we know what we want, but the users also expect more. They
notice right when the network goes down. They can tell exactly when the
BlackBerry goes down."

If anything goes awry, the cost can be not only financial, but
political.
"The operations, technology and logistics of the event have to
demonstrate and reflect our competence to govern," Mr.  Gruin said. "If
something goes really wrong, it's like, well, if you can't run a
convention, how can you run the United States? So for us, that really
raises the stakes."

Pulling it all off is the work of thousands behind the scenes, from the
high-end producers to the technicians who graft the electronic veins and
arteries that carry the event to the world. For them, conventions have
not lost their suspense.
For TV, Some New Tricks

To know when prime time had truly arrived this week, one had only to
watch Jane Maxwell.
Ms. Maxwell, the leader of CNN's special events team, first helped
televise a convention in 1976. She joined CNN in 1980 and has overseen
operations at every convention the network has covered.

All that experience buys a lot of aplomb, and for much of Monday
evening, even from 10 feet away, it was difficult to tell that she was
doing much of anything as she sat among a few producers in CNN's main
control suite on the FleetCenter's fifth level. No loud noises. No
sudden movements.

But up close, one could sense a change at 10:24 p.m., when Hillary
Rodham Clinton took the stage to introduce her husband. Almost like a
pianist's, Ms. Maxwell's fingers began dancing more quickly over the 32
keys on the console controlling the 32 separate audio feeds available to
her headset (she generally listened to two to four at a time).  Her
murmurings into her headset became a little more urgent.

The person she spent most of her time talking to, David Bohrman, was
directing the network's coverage from CNN's headquarters in Atlanta.

"One of the big changes this year is that while the control room used to
have to be on a truck here on-site, now the control room can be in
Atlanta," Ms. Maxwell explained on Sunday evening, leaning forward in an
arena seat that would be occupied by the Rhode Island delegation 24
hours later.  "There was a time not too long ago when it would have been
cost-prohibitive to home-run everything to Atlanta."

But the plunging cost and soaring availability of ultra-high-speed fiber
optic links allows CNN to transmit the raw feed from 20 different
cameras simultaneously to Atlanta (that's about 200 megabits a second; a
T-1 office data line is 1.5 megabits).
That means that the network can send less equipment and fewer people to
a convention site, and use its more extensive production systems at
home. "So the technology does, in a sense, allow us to use less
technology," Ms.  Maxwell said.
But that was not the element of CNN's operation that she was proudest
of. Rather, it was that CNN had managed to arrange the only television
platform directly on the convention floor. When Ms. Maxwell, 51, was
working on her early conventions, such a setup could have become a
disaster because of the crowd noise, which is why networks moved
convention operations to glassed-in skyboxes.

But new earpieces and microphones make such an arrangement feasible.

Gesturing down at the anchor Wolf Blitzer, perhaps 50 feet away, she
said, "See, Wolf has a headset on and you can barely see it, but the
technology allows us to reduce 90 percent of the noise in the hall so he
can barely hear it. If configured correctly, the new microphones also
allow us to really reduce the noise."

In the end, whatever the tools, "you can have a technical setup that
just doesn't support what you want to do editorially," she said. "And
editorially, you can say you want to cover it this way, but the plan
might be totally unfeasible.  We try to marry the two."

Patrolling the Airwaves

The marriage of technology and journalism - and not just in television -
is increasingly founded on advances in wireless technology, and that is
where Mr. Libin and his wireless SWAT team come in.

Until a few years ago, for example, wireless television cameras almost
always used analog technology, and the system required someone next to
the camera to point the signal to a specific receiving station. If the
line of sight was blocked, so was the picture.

Networks are still using some analog wireless cameras, but a new
technology known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing has
fostered digital wireless systems that no longer require a direct line
of sight to the base stations.
That added flexibility has encouraged networks to use more wireless
cameras (in addition to the ubiquitous wireless microphones and
earpieces), and that surge has made Mr.  Libin's job even more
important.

"We're pretty much overwhelmed by the sheer volume of broadcast
equipment that is being allowed,'' Mr. Libin said.
He has spent much of the last six months trying to coordinate just who
gets to use which frequencies at the convention. Mr. Libin, a former NBC
technical official who now runs a consulting firm, assumed his
coordination job essentially through the acclamation of the major TV
networks and the Federal Communications Commission, which granted
special permits and waivers for the event.

F.C.C. staff members collaborate with him in his Level 9 aerie, focusing
on conflicts with law-enforcement and other government radio systems,
while Mr. Libin's team focuses on "civilian'' conflicts.

"The issue is the smaller broadcasters," Mr. Libin said, adding that
they may not be accustomed to coordinating with other crews. "All it
takes is one reporter on a wireless microphone, and a major network gets
knocked off the air."

Sure enough, around 5:10 p.m. on Monday, he and his floor crew spotted a
Swedish television crew near the Massachusetts delegation. At the
convention, Mr. Libin always carries a roll of numbered stickers that
read Approved Radio, and the Swedes' equipment didn't have them. They
were told to wire up or shut down. Less than half an hour later, Mr.
Libin's squad apprehended a television crew from Kansas City.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Libin said that his team had taken down about
65 unapproved television operations and around 35 other violators (like
merchandise vendors with unapproved walkie-talkies) in the convention's
first two days.
An additional complication is that some frequencies used for the
wireless cameras overlap with those for Wi-Fi networking systems. Mr.
Libin's plan allowed some space for Wi-Fi, and in certain pockets of the
convention hall wireless networks can be found, but in general the radio
environment has been too cluttered for reliable widespread Wi-Fi access.
Cellphone companies, however, seem to have substantially increased their
capacity in the area, averting complaints about cellular coverage.
And when it comes to coordinating the airwaves, even Mr.  Libin's
authority goes only so far. "The F.B.I., the Secret Service - we always
tell them exactly where we are, in terms of frequencies," he said. Then
he chuckled. "Of course, they don't always tell us where they are."

Wires Find Their Place

For all of the fancy new wireless technologies and snazzy optical
systems, the bedrock of any major technical event remains (mostly) men
in work boots, toiling on their hands and knees laying cables and
testing connections. In fact, the proliferation of wireless devices
appears to have unleashed a bit of a backlash.

"We're trying to keep as much as we can on a wired basis," said Mr.
Gruin, the convention's technical director.  "Wireless is a lot less
secure, and frankly, with the amount of noise in this environment, it's
a lot less reliable for critical applications."
That may have been one reason Luis Santiago was hunched under the
flickering fluorescent lights of Room 907A (more like a closet) at 3
p.m. last Friday, barely visible behind a massive spool of blue
communications cable that he was trying to feed through a tiny hole in
the closet's floor.

"Look at this," said Mr. Santiago, a 33-year-old communications
apprentice for Sullivan & McLaughlin, a Boston contractor, his voice
equal parts weariness and exasperation. "We're trying to drop this from
here on the ninth floor down to three, and instead someone is pulling it
out on seven." His rubberized yellow Nextel cellphone crackled to life.
"It's going to be a while," called a woman's voice. "It's a real mess
down here."

Mr. Santiago glanced forlornly back at the hulking spool of cable, which
he said was meant to connect a CBS Radio microphone position to a CBS
camera location on the convention floor.

"We did a job at M.I.T. a couple months ago, and that was nothing
compared to this," he said. "The money's good, but the work? You're
filthy and exhausted at the end of the day and you don't want to get up
the next morning, but you do.  And I will say that because this is such
a fast-paced environment, the days fly by and you're working with some
of the best technical people around."

Verizon, the convention's official telecommunications provider,
established network connections into the FleetCenter that can carry a
staggering 4.5 gigabits of information a second, according to Verizon
officials - the equivalent of 3,000 T-1 lines. And telephone service at
the convention site has generally been robust.

But data services have not been as solid. Many news organizations
suffered intermittent breakdowns in Internet service, and on Tuesday
evening the main press pavilion was offline for about 90 minutes. A
spokesman for Verizon said the company deliberately caused the
interruption as part of an effort to root out a more deep-seated network
problem, which the company said appeared to have been caused by a virus
carried by network devices provided by news organizations. In the
interim, a handful of data lines provided by other companies, including
AT&T, served as a backup.

On Wednesday morning, as three Comcast cable technicians set up
televisions for press workstations next to the stage, they joked that
the data problems here might offer a new front for cable competition
with the phone company.
As one of them put it, "We've had a lot of requests for cable modems.''
http://www.goupstate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040729/ZNYT05/407290402/1051/NEWS01

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From: Alan Dixon <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 31 Jul 2004 20:48:37 -0400

Who is this guy Libin--Barney Fife??  Let me get this straight.  What we
have here is a frequency coordinator representing himself (or being
represented as) "Wireless Enforcement", and in charge of a "wireless SWAT
team".  Just who at The Portals died and left this individual in charge
of such matters?

Then I've got to wonder if Mr. Libin has any real understanding of
wireless communications (as opposed to broadcast) traditional protocol
and courtesy, or of FCC Regulations pertinent to the services affected,
the FCC waivers notwithstanding.

"Get your bullet, Barney!"  Or your toy tin badge.  Scary.

-Alan Dixon
"The Washington Iconoclast"

--- In [email-masked], Marcelrf@B... wrote:
Wiring a Convention, Version 2004- Real Wireless Enforcement- We even
took down Nextel! Timmy How Ya Like Me Now?

Posted on July 29, 2004

By SETH SCHIESEL
New York Times

Level 9, where Mr. Libin operates, is more heavily secured than the 
convention floor and houses vital security operations. But Mr. Libin 
is not a Secret Service agent. He is not a police officer. Instead, the 
badge hanging from his neck reads Wireless Enforcement.

Mr. Libin runs the convention's wireless coordination committee, and he 
enforces his own brand of zero-tolerance justice. Armed with advanced 
detection equipment, Mr.  Libin maintains a lookout for radio 
pirates. 

With so many wireless cameras and microphones, so many walkie-
talkies, so many cellphones and so many law-enforcement agencies, 
"this is probably the busiest, noisiest radio frequency environment on
the 
planet right now," said Mr. Libin, a 45-year-old technology consultant 
from Woodmere, N.Y. "We've been working for months on a plan to 
divide up the frequencies, and if someone is not complying with the 
plan, we have to shut them down."

In terms of technology, a political convention is rivaled in 
complexity perhaps only by the Olympics. And with the march of 
digital technology, past experience offers only a partial road map. After

all, just four years ago almost no one had even heard of Wi-Fi.

"The convention in 2000 was different because there were so many new 
options, this whole dot-com barrage, and no one knew what they really 
wanted," said Christopher Gruin, the convention's technology 
director. "This time we know what we want, but the users also expect 
more. They notice right when the network goes down. They can tell 
exactly when the BlackBerry [sic] goes down."

If anything goes awry, the cost can be not only financial, but political.

"The operations, technology and logistics of the event have to 
demonstrate and reflect our competence to govern," Mr. Gruin  
said. "If something goes really wrong, it's like, well, if you can't run
a 
convention, how can you run the United States? So for us, that really 
raises the stakes."

Pulling it all off is the work of thousands behind the scenes, from 
the high-end producers to the technicians who graft the 
electronic veins and arteries that carry the event to the world. 
For them, conventions have not lost their suspense. 

For TV, Some New Tricks

To know when prime time had truly arrived this week, one had 
only to watch Jane Maxwell. Ms. Maxwell, the leader of CNN's 
special events team, first helped televise a convention in 1976. 
She joined CNN in 1980 and has overseen operations at every 
convention the network has covered.

All that experience buys a lot of aplomb, and for much of Monday 
evening, even from 10 feet away, it was difficult to tell that she 
was doing much of anything as she sat among a few producers 
in CNN's main control suite on the FleetCenter's fifth level. 
No loud noises. No sudden movements.

But up close, one could sense a change at 10:24 p.m., when Hillary 
Rodham Clinton took the stage to introduce her husband. Almost like a 
pianist's, Ms. Maxwell's fingers began dancing more quickly over the 
32 keys on the console controlling the 32 separate audio feeds 
available to her headset (she generally listened to two to four at a 
time).  Her murmurings into her headset became a little more urgent.

"One of the big changes this year is that while the control room used 
to have to be on a truck here on-site, now the control room can be in 
Atlanta," Ms. Maxwell explained on Sunday evening, leaning forward 
in an arena seat that would be occupied by the Rhode Island 
delegation 24 hours later.  "There was a time not too long ago when 
it would have been cost-prohibitive to home-run everything to 
Atlanta."

But the plunging cost and soaring availability of ultra-high-speed 
fiber optic links allows CNN to transmit the raw feed from 20 
different cameras simultaneously to Atlanta (that's about 200 
megabits a second; a T-1 office data line is 1.5 megabits). 
That means that the network can send less equipment and 
fewer people to a convention site, and use its more extensive 
production systems at home. "So the technology does, in a 
sense, allow us to use less technology," Ms.  Maxwell said. 
But that was not the element of CNN's operation that she was 
proudest of. Rather, it was that CNN had managed to arrange 
the only television platform directly on the convention floor. 
When Ms. Maxwell, 51, was working on her early conventions, 
such a setup could have become a disaster because of the 
crowd noise, which is why networks moved convention 
operations to glassed-in skyboxes.

But new earpieces and microphones make such an 
arrangement feasible.

Gesturing down at the anchor Wolf Blitzer, perhaps 50 feet 
away, she said, "See, Wolf has a headset on and you can 
barely see it, but the technology allows us to reduce 90 
percent of the noise in the hall so he can barely hear it. If 
configured correctly, the new microphones also allow us to 
really reduce the noise."

In the end, whatever the tools, "you can have a technical setup that 
just doesn't support what you want to do editorially," she said. 
"And editorially, you can say you want to cover it this way, but the 
plan might be totally unfeasible.  We try to marry the two."

Patrolling the Airwaves

The marriage of technology and journalism - and not just in 
television - is increasingly founded on advances in wireless 
technology, and that is where Mr. Libin and his wireless 
SWAT team come in.

Until a few years ago, for example, wireless television cameras 
almost always used analog technology, and the system required 
someone next to the camera to point the signal to a specific 
receiving station. If the line of sight was blocked, so was the picture.

Networks are still using some analog wireless cameras, but a new 
technology known as orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing 
has fostered digital wireless systems that no longer require a direct 
line of sight to the base stations. That added flexibility has 
encouraged networks to use more wireless cameras (in addition 
to the ubiquitous wireless microphones and earpieces), and that 
surge has made Mr.  Libin's job even more important.

"We're pretty much overwhelmed by the sheer volume of 
broadcast equipment that is being allowed,'' Mr. Libin said. 
He has spent much of the last six months trying to coordinate 
just who gets to use which frequencies at the convention. 
Mr. Libin, a former NBC technical official who now runs a 
consulting firm, assumed his coordination job essentially through 
the acclamation of the major TV networks and the Federal 
Communications Commission, which granted special permits 
and waivers for the event.

F.C.C. staff members collaborate with him in his Level 9 aerie, 
focusing on conflicts with law-enforcement and other 
government radio systems, while Mr. Libin's team focuses 
on "civilian'' conflicts.

"The issue is the smaller broadcasters," Mr. Libin said, adding 
that they may not be accustomed to coordinating with other 
crews. "All it takes is one reporter on a wireless microphone, 
and a major network gets knocked off the air."

Sure enough, around 5:10 p.m. on Monday, he and his floor 
crew spotted a Swedish television crew near the Massachusetts 
delegation. At the convention, Mr. Libin always carries a roll of 
numbered stickers that read Approved Radio, and the Swedes' 
equipment didn't have them. They were told to wire up or shut 
down. Less than half an hour later, Mr. Libin's squad apprehended 
a television crew from Kansas City.

On Wednesday morning, Mr. Libin said that his team had taken 
down about 65 unapproved television operations and around 35 
other violators (like merchandise vendors with unapproved walkie-
talkies) in the convention's first two days. An additional complication 
is that some frequencies used for the wireless cameras overlap 
with those for Wi-Fi networking systems. Mr. Libin's plan allowed 
some space for Wi-Fi, and in certain pockets of the convention hall 
wireless networks can be found, but in general the radio 
environment has been too cluttered for reliable widespread Wi-Fi  
access. Cellphone companies, however, seem to have substantially 
increased their capacity in the area, averting complaints about 
cellular coverage. And when it comes to coordinating the airwaves, 
even Mr.  Libin's authority goes only so far. "The F.B.I., the Secret 
Service - we always tell them exactly where we are, in terms of 
frequencies," he said. Then he chuckled. "Of course, they don't 
always tell us where they are."

Wires Find Their Place

For all of the fancy new wireless technologies and snazzy optical 
systems, the bedrock of any major technical event remains (mostly) 
men in work boots, toiling on their hands and knees laying cables 
and testing connections. In fact, the proliferation of wireless devices 
appears to have unleashed a bit of a backlash.

"We're trying to keep as much as we can on a wired basis," said Mr. 
Gruin, the convention's technical director.  "Wireless is a lot less 
secure, and frankly, with the amount of noise in this environment, 
it's a lot less reliable for critical applications." That may have been 
one reason Luis Santiago was hunched under the flickering 
fluorescent lights of Room 907A (more like a closet) at 3 p.m. 
last Friday, barely visible behind a massive spool of blue 
communications cable that he was trying to feed through a tiny hole 
in the closet's floor.

"Look at this," said Mr. Santiago, a 33-year-old communications 
apprentice for Sullivan & McLaughlin, a Boston contractor, his 
voice equal parts weariness and exasperation. "We're trying to 
drop this from here on the ninth floor down to three, and instead 
someone is pulling it out on seven." His rubberized yellow Nextel 
cellphone crackled to life. "It's going to be a while," called a 
woman's voice. "It's a real mess down here."

Mr. Santiago glanced forlornly back at the hulking spool of cable, 
which he said was meant to connect a CBS Radio microphone 
position to a CBS camera location on the convention floor.

"We did a job at M.I.T. a couple months ago, and that was nothing 
compared to this," he said. "The money's good, but the work? You're 
filthy and exhausted at the end of the day and you don't want to get 
up the next morning, but you do.  And I will say that because this is 
such a fast-paced environment, the days fly by and you're working 
with some of the best technical people around."

Verizon, the convention's official telecommunications provider, 
established network connections into the FleetCenter that can 
carry a staggering 4.5 gigabits of information a second, 
according to Verizon officials - the equivalent of 3,000 T-1 
lines. And telephone service at the convention site has generally 
been robust.

But data services have not been as solid. Many news organizations 
suffered intermittent breakdowns in Internet service, and on 
Tuesday evening the main press pavilion was offline for about 90 
minutes. A spokesman for Verizon said the company deliberately 
caused the interruption as part of an effort to root out a more 
deep-seated network problem, which the company said appeared 
to have been caused by a virus carried by network devices provided 
by news organizations. In the interim, a handful of data lines 
provided by other companies, including AT&T, served as a backup.

On Wednesday morning, as three Comcast cable technicians set up 
televisions for press workstations next to the stage, they joked that 
the data problems here might offer a new front for cable competition 
with the phone company. As one of them put it, "We've had a lot 
of requests for cable modems.''

http://www.goupstate.com/apps/pbcs.dll/articleAID=/20040729/ZNYT05/407290
402/1051/NEWS01

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