Backstage at the Global Venue

Isn’t the Global Village wonderful? These days, it's no big thing for high school kids in New York City and their friends near Timbuktu to rock out over the satellite link. We can pretty much take things like that for granted. Or can we? Consider the following event...

On December 19, The Weill Music Institute at Carnegie Hall presented a distance learning event connecting high school students and musicians in New York City with their counterparts in Bamako, Mali, via satellite videoconference. Focusing on a different region of the world each year, Carnegie Hall's Global Encounters program integrates world music and cultures into high school social studies and music classrooms.

This event, one of more than a dozen concerts and in-school sessions taking place in both Mali and New York, was "something extraordinary" according to the African music enthusiast Website, Afropop. Through the combination of performances and a lively Q&A session between the students, "the students in Bamako and New York wound up dispelling stereotypes and respecting more the way of life in each others' cultures. And they had fun!" It was agreed that the video was as seamless as on TV and that the technology didn't get in the way of the people and the music.

Little did they know that Carnegie Hall and CGNET technical staff had been working on the event since the previous April, and that making it happen required many months of technical planning.

The first thing to know is that even in these days of IP everywhere Carnegie Hall has found that while the Internet can carry perfectly good discussions over video, performances are something else. When there's music, singing and dancing, you're really in "real time," and any technical artifacts affect the performance. So the first requirement for the videoconference was that it had to be over a dedicated connection.

In June, CGNET field consultant Issa Lawali, based in neighboring Niger, went to Bamako to identify potential carriers for the conference. What he found out was that none of the locals supported dedicated lines. They all relied on the Internet. Carnegie Hall did a comparable search among international carriers from New York, to find one that could get a temporary dedicated line into Bamako. The alternatives looked like either installing a VSAT ground station just for the performance, a highly expensive proposition, or tolerating Internet glitches. Both were equally unacceptable.

"That's why I enjoy working on projects like this," said Jim Estes, CGNET's Chief Operating Officer and the technical lead for this effort. "You say you can't do that? Well, you should be able to do something here..." Jim remembered that the World Bank, famous for its global videoconferencing system, had an office in Bamako.

Conversations with the World Bank's videoconferencing staff made the conference possible. If Carnegie Hall could provide dedicated connectivity from the concert hall in Bamako, which ended up being the Centre Culturel Français
(CCF), to the World Bank's Bamako office, and if another dedicated line could be set up from the bank's Washington D.C. videoconferencing center to Carnegie Hall in New York, concert-quality videoconferencing could happen.

CGNET and Afribone Mali, a local service provider, set up a line-of-sight 48-mbps wireless link between the CCF and the World Bank, five kilometers away. One megabit of bandwidth was actually used, with another for backup. In the weeks before December 19, two tests and a rehearsal were held. After each one, all the equipment had to be removed from the CCF and taken back to Afribone, except for the outdoor antenna.

Things in the U.S. went more slowly, working with domestic carriers. The fastest service Carnegie Hall could get for the Washington-New York T1 was installation after a three-month wait. Advance planning paid off and Carnegie Hall ordered with enough lead time to ensure the delivery.

Planning for Carnegie Hall's next event in its Global Encounters will be underway shortly. Everybody is hoping that a videoconference with a connection-rich far-end will be easier to arrange than with Bamako. We'll see...

Photos courtesy of Afropop Worldwide, www.afropop.org. Check them out for great coverage of African and world music!