Wi-Fi for the Aldeburgh Food & Drink Festival
The event
The Aldeburgh Food & Drink Festival brings around 12,000 people to Snape over two days, with around 60 food and drink traders, bars, seating areas and live cooking demonstrations on the Fire Pit stage. We’ve looked after the festival’s Wi-Fi for the past three years.
The challenge
Before we got involved, the festival had been told by three different companies, over as many years, that its Wi-Fi couldn’t be improved. The connection wasn’t even reliable enough for traders’ card machines.
An outdoor site like this needs a dependable connection in places that were never designed for one. Traders rely on card payments all day, the festival team needs to stay connected to run the event, and mobile signal struggles once thousands of people arrive at the same time.
What we did
We started with a thorough assessment of the site and drew up a plan that worked for everyone: organisers, traders and visitors.
- Internet: the network runs from the site’s own leased line
- Fibre backbone: a fibre backbone links our own dedicated network switches around the site
- Wi-Fi: every access point is cabled back to those switches with temporary cabling, rather than relying on wireless links between them
- Separate networks: traders and the public each have their own Wi-Fi, kept apart from each other, so card payments aren’t competing with thousands of visitors’ phones
Everything is installed and tested before the gates open. We then keep an engineer on site and monitor the network remotely throughout the festival, and take it all away afterwards.
The result
The festival went from a connection that couldn’t cope with card machines to fast, reliable Wi-Fi across the whole site. Over 1,000 devices connected over the weekend, with enough capacity for every visitor, trader and business user. Organiser Bella Scarr’s verdict is below.
Planning an event? Find out more about our event Wi-Fi or get in touch below.
