In short: Priddy Folk Festival is a not-for-profit event on the Mendips which raises money for local schools and for music, and which attracts bands from across the country. Like most rural events it sits somewhere the public mobile network is thin, and whilst that was tolerable when the worst consequence was a dropped voice call, it ceased to be tolerable once every trader on site took payment by card, the committee ran the event over WhatsApp, and a radio station broadcast the weekend live. For the second year running we took a gigabit fibre service from a house in the village, beamed 5G from there across the site, and distributed it to the traders, the food outlets and the operations team over portable Wi-Fi.
The connectivity story at the Priddy Folk Festival is multifaceted
- The problem is capacity, not coverage. The public network at Priddy is, as our own presenter put it on the day, "just about there, OK for a few voice calls when it's not too busy". Add two thousand people and there is nothing left for the point-of-sale terminals and live streams which the site actually depends upon.
- A rural event is now a card-only business. One trader told us, without hedging, that "if we can't take card payments in this day and age, we can't trade", which reframes connectivity from an amenity into a precondition for the event happening at all.
- Aerix has unique experience to manage these kinds of deployments. Having deployed at Priddy the previous year amongst many rural temporary and permanent installations, we already knew where the backhaul could come from, where the radios would go and which parts of the site the terrain shadows. A second deployment leveraging our experience became a matter of execution rather than discovery, ensuring a cost-effective service is delivered.
- Value is non-negotiable. Being a not-for-profit festival relying on many local volunteers and members of the local community, the budget was strict for delivering the connection needed. Aerix is able to leverage their agile and low-cost deployment solutions, mixed with some local knowledge, to keep the spend well below the offerings of larger networks.
In a nutshell
The problem at Priddy is capacity, not coverage
It is tempting to describe places like Priddy as not-spots, but that is not quite right, and the distinction matters because it changes what a solution has to do. There is a public mobile network in the village, and on an ordinary Tuesday it does more or less what one would expect of it; the difficulty arises entirely from what happens when a field fills up with people.
The festival draws bands from all over the country and, on the weekend we were there, some two thousand people onto a site which is a working landscape for the remainder of the year. Every one of those people carries a handset which would like to upload photographs and check messages, and all of them attach to the same handful of distant cells, with the consequence that what remains for the people who need the network in order to do their jobs is very little, at precisely the moment they need it most.
Why does the distinction matter? Because a coverage problem is solved by getting a signal into a place, whereas a capacity problem is solved by putting capacity where the demand actually is, which is a different exercise requiring different equipment, and which at an event is necessarily a temporary one. We conclude that the useful question at a rural event is not whether there is a signal, but how much of it survives contact with the crowd.
What the traders told us they needed it for
The most valuable part of spending a weekend on a site of this kind is that one stops speculating about requirements and starts hearing them from the people who have them. A local trader described their needs bluntly: "if we can't take card payments in this day and age, we can't trade".
What many may not realise is how far beyond the till the dependency runs. Those card payments are not merely revenue on the day; they are also the data which runs the operation behind the scenes, through stock-taking and ordering of goods. The committee, running the festival, coordinates the whole event over email and WhatsApp. Importantly, this means that a network failure at a modern festival does not simply stop transactions, it stops the organisation communicating with itself, and it leaves a hole in next year's ordering. Essentially, the network has become part of the back office rather than part of the entertainment.
The broadcast is a different shape of demand again
Positioned prominently in the village green for much of the weekend sat local broadcasters GWS Radio, streaming live sets and commentary both locally and globally throughout the event. The broadcast goes out from their studio at Northover Mill in Glastonbury, and, as they put it, "without Wi-Fi we have no connection to broadcast".
This is the requirement which event organisers most commonly underestimate, for two reasons. Firstly, a live stream is not a nice-to-have bolted onto the programme; it is a scheduled commitment to an audience who are not on site, and it fails publicly when it fails. Secondly, and non-trivially from a design point of view, it has a completely different traffic profile from a card terminal, requiring sustained upstream throughput for hours at a time rather than a few hundred bytes every few minutes. A network designed around payments alone will not serve a broadcaster, whilst one designed around the broadcaster alone is an expensive way to run a card machine.
How we built it: a gigabit in the heart of rural Somerset
Every temporary network begins with the same question, namely where the capacity is going to come from. At Priddy the answer turned out to be a house in the village with a gigabit fibre service into it, which is the genuinely useful thing about rural Britain at present: the fibre rollout has reached a great many individual properties. What is missing is not capacity into the village, it is any means of getting that capacity to the festival where two thousand keen attendees and traders are gathered.
Aerix used a combination of one of its temporary private 5G masts, erected in a matter of minutes on-site, to provide a backhaul to accompanying meshed Wi-Fi access points. There is no fibre to dig, no cabinet to install and no time to iterate, since the traders are trading from the moment the gates open. Here Aerix used their real-world experience in the practicalities of 5G deployment; trade-offs we would make for a permanent rural network, where deployments can be optimised over a period of months, are replaced by trade-offs which favour speed of deployment and cost/time effectiveness. This means the design is not the one a textbook would produce, and it is the one which is fit for commercial usage on a Friday afternoon in a field.
Aerix brings value to organisations who cannot afford the alternatives
Without introducing Aerix's know-how and agile strategies to these sorts of deployments, all of the benefits of connectivity we have discussed would be well beyond the reach of a community-led not-for-profit festival such as in Priddy. Presence of a major network operator would cost many times the amount, if they were even interested at all. We take pride in knowing that our cost-effective, straightforward and value-driven approach can genuinely make the difference in these sorts of festivals being the success they are.