What does it take to wire an old airfield so it can support 2000 hackers with a voracious, simultaneous appetite for bandwidth?
Answer: Imagination. That and cords enough to make a Radio Shack junkie drool.
The most striking thing entering the old military airfield where the Chaos Communication Camp is being held this week is the cables stretched everywhere, across fields, hung from bunkers, most obviously leading into blue porta-potty containers scattered throughout the grounds, retooled to serve as network hubs stuffed with switches and fiber connections instead of semi-sanitary facilities.
In charge of most of this is Elisa Jasinska, head of the CCC Network Operations Center, who's been on site for a week and half setting up for the event.
Planning for an outdoor camping festival, where campers expect full broadband access facilities in their tents, presents a whole range of problems a typical conference can avoid, she says. (Even aside from the mosquitoes and hour-long shower lines.)
The old air museum didn't have anywhere near the kind of bandwidth needed, so organizers first arranged to have a 2.2 mile cable uplink cable laid from the facility to the local ISP's nearest junction point. That cable remains a source of some concern – one break, and the entire camp loses the Internet -- so it's stretched high above the ground in places, out of campers' reach, and covered or buried in others.
Two and a half miles of fiber cables run in and out of 16 converted toilets, called "datenklos." Tents cluster around them, in the woods, against the old bunkers, in the fields; Ethernet cables snake out to 
give the campers direct access, but there's also Wi-Fi blanketing the area.
Early network planning had to be revised once people started arriving, Jasinska said. One wooded area (my own camping spot, incidentally) was originally planned as data-free; but once people started arriving and pitching their tents, organizers realized it too would need a data potty.
The overall bandwidth is a little less than organizers had hoped. They're used to 10 Gbps pipes, and indeed, their own camp backbone supports that, but the local ISP could only dedicate a 300 Mbps connection. That means there's a little competition for bandwidth, and connections are occasionally slow, but on the whole it's been remarkably trouble-free. Many American ISPs could benefit from this kind of chaos.
(Photos: A datenklo, and cables snaking past the "art and beauty" bunker.)
