Yesterday was remarkable. Historian Heather Cox Richardson covered the core of the event in her newsletter:
On Saturday, October 3, the Power to the People festival, organized by Rock & Roll Hall of Fame guitarist Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, took over the stage at the Merriweather Post Pavilion in Columbia, Maryland. On two stages were rock, alternative, and hip hop royalty, joining together to remind Americans of their agency to change the future and reclaim American democracy.
The line-up of musicians was legendary. Joan Baez, Jack Black, Cypress Hill, Dropkick Murphys, Flavor Flav, Foo Fighters, The Linda Lindas, Mike McCready, Killer Mike, Dave Matthews, Public Enemy, Nathaniel Rateliff, Bruce Springsteen, Stephen Stills, and Serj Tankian, among others, covered seven decades of American music.
There’s just no other way to put it other than remarkable. We’ve been working for weeks on the production side of Power to the People, which took place yesterday at my home venue of Merriweather Post Pavilion. Putting on a show of this caliber meant a lot of preparation work, even just from the network side. We had just about every part of the venue tuned up to 11. Hundreds of people worked thousands of hours to put on the show.
We moved our network to Ubiquiti in the Spring, a modernization effort a year in the planning, and this was our biggest stress test yet. The step up from gigabit core to 10- and 25-gigabit uplinks gave us a lot more internal capacity, and we put it to the test yesterday.
With so many guests backstage, a second stage in use, and visiting media and broadcast gear, we gave it a great push. A usual festival day, like for All Things Go in late September, would put around 150-200Mbps of constant bandwidth utilization, for around 1,000 devices simultaneously.
Yesterday, we did a whole lot better:
We finished with more than 2,500 unique devices on the network, and more than 1,800 simultaneously on our campus-wide network, most of which were wireless devices hitting our nearly 60 access points.
Our fiber plant across the property handled dozens of cameras, including a couple aerial drones that gave us some incredible vistas of the venue as full as I’ve ever seen it. We designed our fiber plant to handle events just like this, and to see it fulfill its design is nothing short of joyful. There are few things quite like practicing, over and over, and preparing for the big day only to knock it out of the park.
I’ve been doing shows with Merriweather for a long time now, and in addition to the venue being packed, it was joyful in ways I haven’t seen it before. There was purpose and joy on the stage, and the audience was every bit as unified and enthusiastic in their rejection of America’s fascist turn, of authoritarian rule, and the desire for a return to real American values.
Celebrate your wins.
Then, review the game tape and make sure you’re ready for the next one.
What is game? Who got game? Where’s the game in life, behind the game, behind the game?
I got game
She got game
We got game
They got game
He got game
It might feel good
It might sound a lil’ somethin’
But the f*%& the game if it ain’t saying nothin’.Public Enemy
