Event WiFi Solution for Nibley Music Festival

Nibley Festival is a family friendly music festival based just outside of Bristol in the Cotswold countryside. 

The volunteer run, not-for profit festival commands over 5,000 attendees over two days in late June every year.

After struggling with connectivity, the event management team at 2Can Productions came to Bytes Digital looking for improved WiFi at the festival.

Having cash on site has become a burden over recent years—with increased security costs and handling issues, as well as the obvious risk it poses to have cash on site at a working festival.

After considering these factors, the organisers of Nibley Festival decided to make it a cashless event. 

It was this decision that lead Nibley to procure an effective, bullet-proof Event WiFi solution that enabled their vendors, bars and ticketing teams to take card payments quickly and with confidence. 

The remote location of Nibley Festival makes mobile signal a challenge; as such, the site team and traders on site have struggled with internet connectivity in previous years.

With years of experience at rural and greenfield events, Bytes Digital recommended a satellite solution this year—providing a far more robust and dependable WiFi connection.

• Separate, segmented festival WiFi networks for bars, staff and vendors
• Bandwidth control restrictions for vendors, preventing ‘bandwidth hogging’ and ensuring card payments went through quickly‍
• Satellite connectivity and other technologies such as point-to-point connectivity across the festival site
• High power, stadium-grade WiFi distributed across the site to the key areas to provide a strong WiFi signal to card machines, PDQ terminals and other devices
• On site technical network support from the Bytes Digital in-house team to actively monitor and maintain the WiFi network throughout the festival

Running a cashless event can be a stressful experience, and with such heavy reliance on the WiFi connectivity for payments, the solution had to be trusted and unfailing. The Bytes Digital team took time to rigorously plan the WiFi network, to ensure a smooth deployment and quick one-day installation.

Over the two day festival, thousands of attendees were able to seamlessly make payments. Over 200 devices were connected to the network, with vendors and bars pushing hundreds of Gigabytes of data across the weekend.

“The entire team has proven to be one of the best WiFi Contractors we have ever worked with.” Says the site management team.