Connectivity Is Key to a Successful Major Event.
When planning a major event, reliable internet, WiFi and other converged technology systems are essential. They ensure seamless experiences for production, broadcast and livestreams, attendees, and exhibitors, partners and sponsors. Unlike smaller events, major events can span large venues and multiple locations, and often require support for a large variety of groups and applications.
Events such as conferences, trade shows, and city-wide activations present unique challenges that require careful planning to ensure cohesive, seamless and uninterrupted connectivity. Some of the characteristics that make major events more complex include:
- Large numbers of attendees and devices
- Very large venues and multiple spaces
- Combines larger and smaller activations
- Complex multi-day schedules with ongoing setup and teardown schedules
- Months of product development and project management
- Interfacing with multiple groups, vendors, partners and stakeholders
If you’re planning a major event, these are some key considerations for ensuring you have the right live event WiFi and internet solutions in place.
Ensuring Internet, WiFi and Technology Success
Ensuring a reliable network for a major event involves more than just providing basic internet access. A properly designed network must support the unique demands of all users, including production teams, exhibitors, and attendees, while potentially integrating with existing venue infrastructure. This includes the ability to overlay or fully replace incumbent network providers, ensuring high-capacity connections between venues using fiber links or licensed wireless solutions to maintain seamless connectivity.
Proper WiFi design is critical. Using professional tools like Ekahau or iBwave ensures optimal placement of WiFi Access Points (WAPs), minimizing interference and maximizing coverage and performance.
Ultimately, a well-planned network balances resiliency, performance, and cost-efficiency, ensuring the event’s network infrastructure can handle high-demand scenarios without overbuilding and driving up unnecessary costs.
When planning your event, it’s important to consider the size, scope, and types of venues you’ll be using—particularly if they include unconventional spaces like parking lots, outdoor areas, or temporary structures. A reliable networking provider can address the challenges you face when large crowds livestream, message, and conduct sales transactions all at once. Choosing a provider with expertise in large temporary events ensures your network will handle the unique demands of multi-venue events.
In addition to WiFi, event organizers may also require I.T. consulting, network security, CCTV, digital signage, wayfinding and location services, asset tracking, livestream encoding, attendee engagement platforms, and converged services for audio, video, and lighting. Ensuring the right infrastructure is in place means considering everything from firewalls and routers to access points and network resource allocation. Creating an ultra-reliable network is essential to ensuring a seamless experience for attendees and organizers alike.
Key Components of a Reliable Network:
- Right-Sized Internet Transport
Selecting the correct internet transport service is critical. The bandwidth must accommodate all users and applications while ensuring low latency and high performance for production systems, livestreams, attendee services, and more. - Resiliency and Redundancy
Building a resilient network means delivering service from multiple transport providers with diverse physical network paths to prevent single points of failure. This approach ensures the network remains operational with preferred routing paths, even if one link goes down. - Appropriate Distribution Network
The distribution network must be properly designed to connect all service locations—registration, POS, exhibit halls, breakouts, production areas, and more—to the internet gateways. A well-designed local network will have the capacity to handle unexpected traffic spikes, ensuring seamless connectivity across the entire event footprint. - Technology
The right hardware and software used for the network infrastructure will ensure optimal performance. Gold standard networking equipment vendors include Cisco, Arista, Ruckus Wireless, Juniper, and Palo Alto Networks. Firewalls, security platforms, routers, and switches must be properly sized and configured properly to meet the event’s demands. Network security protocols and best practices must also be implemented to protect the network from potential threats. - WiFi Infrastructure Design
Conducting wireless surveys both before and during the event is essential to ensure the WiFi network performs optimally. These surveys help identify potential interference, ensure proper channel assignments, and optimize the placement of WiFi Access Points (WAPs) to reduce cross-channel interference. Once the survey data is gathered, the WiFi design must be tailored to the event’s specific needs. This includes selecting the right WAP models, ensuring adequate coverage for high-density areas, and configuring the network to handle high user density and bandwidth demands efficiently. - Balanced Network Design
It’s important to strike the right balance when designing a network. Overbuilding the network can increase costs and complexity unnecessarily, while underbuilding may lead to performance issues. The goal is to provide more than enough resources to meet the event’s requirements without excessive spending while providing additional capacity if needed. - The Right Team!
An expert provider’s team will include program and project managers, senior network architects and engineers, senior and junior network technicians, and Layer 1 installation teams with experience in large and complex deployments and high-density WiFi Access Point installation on truss and beam systems. - Management, Monitoring and Reporting
Look for a team that provides onsite resources that will manage, monitor, and provide support of the network throughout the duration of the event and beyond. This includes providing incident management and post-event analytics.
A professional and experienced managed internet, network and WiFi provider will consider all these factors when creating a network plan, ensuring reliable, secure high-performance connectivity that supports all user groups—from production teams to attendees.
Without these considerations, your event could suffer from poor user experiences, damaged reputation, and lost revenue opportunities. A carefully designed network, tailored to your event’s needs, is essential to ensure a seamless and successful experience for everyone involved.
