Cob Jockey

There's a very small cross-section of people who will be interested in the networking infrastructure powering a larger hunter jumper show, but I am one of those people, and this is my blog!


The Upperville Horse Show in Virginia has some pretty unique networking needs, which are powered by gear from my favorite networking vendor, Ubiquiti.  Here's an excerpt from the blog post about it:

Every year, an empty field in Virginia is transformed into a small city with tents everywhere.  The tents provide stabling for 500 horses, VIP seating and vendors.   Two large office trailers provide the room for servers and desks full of staff taking entries and keeping track of results on laptops.    Two video production trailers provide international live feed of the 5-6 video cameras covering the 4 separate show rings.  Each individual ride video is recorded, edited and packaged so the riders can later purchase them. 

Three giant video screens work as score boards, provide live video, and run sponsorship advertisements. 

Four starting gates (one of each ring) have to be connected to the network so the names of riders can be entered and relayed back to the servers keeping track of everything.   Free Wifi is provided at the VIP tents and the Press Tents. 

All of this is powered by a UniFi.

All of the above generates a ton of traffic - a Terabye of WAN traffic in a week as shown below is ridiculous.


They basically have to create an enterprise-grade network out in the middle of a field, once a year, for a week, which is crazy.  Enterprise grade anything related to computers doesn't just happen overnight like that.



For more behind-the-scenes tech footage of Upperville, click here for the entire blog post.