"It looks like we're gonna need a bigger boat." In the fast-paced world of radio broadcasting we have all been through the experience where our facilities no longer meet the programming requirements of the business. Just like local radio studios, national radio networks also have to meet the ever-increasing needs for technical facilities.

Dial Global has undergone tremendous growth in the past three years. The acquisition of Waitt Radio Networks and Jones Radio Networks in 2008 drove the needs to develop a technical infrastructure to support the most advanced technology in network radio today.

The project involved the relocation of Waitt's Omaha infrastructure to Denver and creating a nationwide infrastructure that can support the needs of the network programming experts and the stations. Unlike a typical station cluster upgrade, these facilities impact thousands of affiliates and service interruptions are intolerable. This project was completed without any loss of airtime, which was the direct result of a coordinated plan utilizing the talents of our entire technical staff, vendors and executives.

Space design, materials and color selection were all coordinated by an interior designer. Photo by Richard Douglas, Windimagery.

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Moving to the mountains

We chose a centralized hub-and-spoke architecture for the overall network plan with the Network Operations Center in Denver. We also overlapped a distributed network topology for our redundancy employing other facilities to ensure the network provides unparalleled reliability in the event of an outage condition in the hub. For example our Valencia, CA, network facility can take over uplink operations in the event of a disaster situation in Denver or even in the situation where maintenance may have a potential impact to affiliates.

The Denver facilities were upgraded with 11 new studios and a significant expansion of the older Network Operations Center; control center and rack room.

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