Representative deployment · Outdoor festival / sporting event
Situation. A two-day outdoor festival on a fairground site — no permanent infrastructure — with peak attendance around 50,000. Requirements: 60 POS terminals across bars and merch tents, 6 credentialing/ticketing gates, ops and safety communications, sponsor activations, and two continuous live streams. The year prior, single-carrier hotspots at the bars collapsed at peak crowd; the operator estimated one hour of POS outage across 20 terminals at a $40 average ticket cost thousands in direct lost sales, before counting abandoned lines. The alternative quoted was temporary fiber: five figures, weeks of lead time, and trenching permits.
Old-way cost. Trenched temp fiber (five figures, single path, weeks of lead time) or consumer hotspots with a proven history of dying exactly at peak revenue hours. Both options rented; neither survived contact with 50,000 phones.
Solution. West Networks deployed the Festival / Stadium Kit — the same architecture we run at golf majors, F1, and SailGP:
– Peplink Balance 580X core with 8×5G modules spread across four carriers
– Starlink bonded into the SpeedFusion tunnel — a capacity path untouched by tower congestion
– AP One Enterprise WiFi mesh covering POS tents, gates, ops compound, and sponsor row
– Segmented networks: POS and gates on priority, ops next, press/sponsors best-effort
– Elevated directional antennas above crowd height; priority event data plans, not consumer SIMs
– Deployed in one day during site build; remotely monitored throughout the event
Results.
– 300+ Mbps aggregate at peak crowd, with SpeedFusion continuously steering traffic across 8 cellular paths + Starlink as individual carrier sectors saturated and recovered
– 60/60 POS terminals online through both peak windows — zero payment downtime; both live streams delivered without interruption; gates never fell back to manual scanning
– Starlink carried up to a third of traffic during the worst cellular congestion windows — the path 50,000 phones couldn’t touch
– Deployed in hours, not the weeks a fiber trench needed, at a fraction of its five-figure cost — and the operator owns the kit
– Year-over-year: the prior year’s peak-hour POS failures (thousands lost per incident) went to zero; the kit redeploys at every event on the operator’s calendar for ~$250 in service and data each time
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