October 9, 2004, Vienna, VA— Today, Network Designs, Inc (NDI) provided public access to the Library of Congress (LOC) private network from the lawn of the National Mall. The fourth annual National Book Festival, hosted by First Lady Laura Bush, was held in Washington, D.C., with approximately 70,000 attendees and 70 award-winning authors, illustrators, poets, and storytellers in attendance.
For the third straight year at this event, NDI used wireless technology to provide live access to private LOC network assets not available through the Internet. More than a dozen workstations located at the main LOC Pavilion provided full access to the library's computer systems, demonstrating to festival-goers the broad range of services available through the Library of Congress facilities. NDI also provided voice-over-IP (VoIP) stations at the Media Pavilion, enabling dial-in and dial-out services to news reporters interviewing authors and illustrators participating at the event.
NDI integrated Cisco Systems technologies to deliver both encrypted broadband network and VoIP services from the National Mall lawn. "Every year, we come to this event with a new solution to overcome environmental challenges like a saturated bandwidth and marginal line-of-sight between campus communication points. We have to be creative with our antennas to turn a lack of line-of-sight scenario into a success," said Greg Conran, Chief Technology Officer for NDI. In this year's solution, wireless signals were successfully directed over the Capitol Building to the main LOC Pavilion, then off to several areas on the National Mall outside of direct line-of-sight, providing 50 megabits of continuous bandwidth to LOC networked computers and VoIP stations during the entire festival day.