It started as a fully hardwired architecture. But as the band grew to play larger venues such as big stadiums, the amount of cable grew too. "We had 4,800 feet of CAT 5 cable, and about 2,200 feet of it had to be dropped on the floor," Arias says.

All that cable meant a longer time to set up and tear down the network, and more equipment to transport and then hoist on and off the trucks. So after testing some Lucent Technologies WaveLan Access Point switches on another band's tour in the spring, Arias phased in the wireless backbone during Dave Matthews Band's summer tour. But he had to do some creative configuring to make the wireless technology more transportable. With the help of Lucent vendor Wireless Information Networks, Arias built what he calls a droid -- a portable unit with a WaveLan Access Point and antennae mounted on tripods, fastened with special brackets custom-made by a machine shop.

"The original design of this device is for permanent installation, but we needed to make it portable," he says.

At most shows, droids are positioned outside the dressing room, the crew room, the stage, and accounting, production and MIS offices to connect these rooms to the network. Hubs, laser printers, PCs and servers within each room and the stage are hardwired with CAT 5 cable. Dave Matthews Band also runs Apple Computer AirPort Base Stations for roaming with the group's laptops, which use AirPort or Lucent's WaveLan PCMCIA cards. The wireless backbone runs at 11 Mbps on a 2.4-GHz channel.

The traveling intranet originated from the band's database: Arias was initially hired to help Ian Kuhn, the band's monitor engineer and Webmaster, devise a faster method to update the road segment of the band's Web site and to centralize its database, which includes the band's set lists at each show. The network extended its FileMaker Pro-based archival and production database to other concert-related information, such as guest lists and ticket sales from the band's fan club, Arias says.

Two Apple iMac servers run at each venue for file storage, and a FileMaker Pro Server provides set-list updates and song cues during the show. It also archives recordings and video footage. The ticket sales and seating arrangements at the shows, including guest lists, are tracked remotely via SQL servers hosted in the band's hometown of Charlottesville, Va.

The downside with wireless, of course, is interference. Arias has experienced interference mostly from wireless handsets and fluorescent lighting as well as from nearby railway switching stations, which also use frequency in the 2.4-GHz range. Even a full house of concertgoers can affect the signal, Arias says. So he runs a spectrum analyzer at each show and changes channels as needed.

The band and crew also run AppleTalk/IP Instant Messaging locally, and Internet messaging and access, too, for banking and paying bills remotely, for instance. As for security, the band has static IP addresses rather than more easily hacked dynamic ones.

But the biggest risk is breaking the equipment during the setup and teardown process. "Even though I designed it to be portable, it isn't rugged," Arias says. "The two Lucent PCMCIA cards sticking out of each Access Point are extremely fragile."

For Internet access, meanwhile, Arias typically just taps into the existing infrastructure at an arena -- usually T1 or T3 connections. But if a venue isn't wired, Arias orders a satellite hookup from Entertainment Technology Associates (Entertech) in Houston. He prefers the satellite provider's dedicated channel, which offers uplink data rates of up to 1.544 Mbps.