Case Study: Festival WiFi
Keeping Traders Connected at Rock N Ribs Festival
Location: Bath & West Showground
Scale: 12,000+ Visitors | ~100 Traders
Partner: Bearfoot Productions
Our Role: Temporary Festival WiFi for Card Payments
The Challenge
If you’ve ever been to an outdoor event, you already know what can happen to your phone as soon as a crowd turns up. 12,000 people trying to post videos, send texts, and load maps at the same time will kill the local mobile signal almost instantly.
For the 100 odd traders at Rock N Ribs, that’s a massive issue. If mobile data drops out, card readers stop working, queues start backing up, and vendors lose money. Bearfoot Productions knew they needed reliable internet to support their traders and so approached us for a solution that would provide a solid, dedicated WiFi network for card payments all weekend.
What We Did
Getting decent WiFi into the middle of a field takes a bit more work than just plugging in a router and hoping for the best. Most of the hard work actually happens before we even set foot on site.
1. Mapping it out
When we received the brief, the first step was working out how exactly we could deliver it. We spent time reviewing the venue’s sitemaps and worked with TP-Link’s design software to build detailed coverage heatmaps. This allowed us to simulate how WiFi signals would travel across the field and figure out where every access point needed to go to ensure full coverage for the traders.
2. Starlink at the core
Instead of relying on phone networks that were bound to get overloaded in such a densely populated setting, we used Starlink to bring high speed satellite internet down to the field. Just one dish was enough to service the entire site and by implementing bandwidth restrictions, we were able to distribute the connection evenly to all traders.
3. Beaming signal across the site
To get internet across the grounds without running miles of wire across main walkways, we mounted wireless bridge dishes high up on poles to beam signal around the venue. Where we did need physical cables, we ran them overhead along festoon lighting structures. That kept wires off the ground and away from festivalgoers and vehicles.
4. Built for efficient deployment
Festival builds are busy and involve coordination with other teams on site. With only a couple of days to actually install the solution, we had to ensure the majority of the work was prepped beforehand so that in the main, we could plug and go. To achieve this, we pre configured all the equipment, built custom fixings and attachments and carefully organised the kit to be easily accessible on the day :
- Custom electrical boxes
- Weatherproof enclosures built to handle outdoor conditions safely.
- 3D-printed mounts
- Custom pole attachments we designed and printed ourselves to fix hardware securely.
- Organised transit cases
- Every AP and bridge dish was pre-labeled and packed in sturdy cases custom fitted with foam cutouts so we could grab what we needed without digging through loose kit.
The Result
The temporary network kept vendors up and running throughout the event:
- ~100 traders maintained reliable connections all weekend to process card transactions without relying on clogged local mobile networks.
- With the kit centrally managed on the TP-Link Omada platform, we had sitewide visibility allowing us to manage the network efficiently on the ground, keeping overall disruption to a minimum.
- With the best will in the world, there will always be things you can’t anticipate, whether that’s access constraints, power availability or even the weather! However, our pre-planning made both the setup and take-down as efficient as possible in a hectic festival build environment.
Delivering this festival WiFi solution successfully hinged on two things: thorough planning before we arrived, and having as much of the kit prepped beforehand. When every piece of kit works in harmony, traders can get on with running their jobs without a second thought.
This was a fantastic project to be part of, and it definitely tested our network setup in a fast moving environment. It’s amazing to see how far event connectivity has come over the last few years; hardware like Starlink makes internet deleivery possible in places where, not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable.
