With Bryan Waters

Codes Offer Redunancy, Backup and Failover

Entercom’s Eric Fitch on how his operation has benefited from trends in codecs and STL

Eric J. Fitch is director of technical operations for Entercom New England. He has been a broadcast engineer for 35 years, working in Syracuse, Albany and Boston. Today he is responsible for 14 stations in five markets.

Radio World: What’s the most important trend in codecs? Eric Fitch: Redundancy, backup and failover.

With more facilities being managed by fewer people, there is a huge need for systems to be able to recover from outages without human intervention.

Remote access via a web GUI, as well as having logging, SNMP and Eric J. Fitch e-mail capabilities are critical for managing equipment at remote locations.

RW: How are these technologies helping you solve practical problems? Fitch: We are able to connect our studios in Boston, Providence, Springfield and Worcester to their associated transmitter sites and the Westwood One Satellite NOC up by a wireless internet consupply, which is great if and when the UPS fails.

in Denver, which uplinks the WEEI Sports Radio Network in most people’s homes. Just 10 years ago we were struggling with DSL and 56 kb dialup modems.

Now with cable modems and fiber service, we someand the Red Sox Radio Network, via GatesAir IPL-200 Audio over IP systems.

Our GatesAir IPL-200 systems have replaced our Intra

With cable modems and fiber service, we sometimes have better internet connectivity at our homes than we have

plex T-1 STL systems. Each site has three ISPs to provide triple redundant paths for the audio streams. We have a fiber-based MPLS system as the primary connection to each location. That is backed nection at the studio and cable modems at transmitter sites. We have a third connection to each ISP via our business network on a second fiber network from the studio. The IPL-200 is able to have three separate audio streams that can failover if one or two of the streams drops, keeping the station on the air, while notifying us via e-mail or SNMP that there is a fault. The system has an optional redundant power

The ability to access all 28 nodes of the IPL-200 on our network from work or home makes configuring and troubleshooting a breeze. We can see when an ISP has a failure at any of our sites because there are multiple ways to log into the codec.

RW: What role are codecs playing in the new normal of at-home broadcasting? Fitch: We are lucky that high-speed internet is available

at our studios and transmitter sites. times have better internet connectivity at our homes than we have at our studios and transmitter sites. The connections are so good that our listeners don’t notice that the hosts are doing the shows from home.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 35