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 at the top of the valley, beamed 5G from there across the site, and distributed it to the traders, the food outlets and the operations team over portable Wi-Fi.
Key Takeaways
- 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.
- The backhaul was already in the valley, simply not where the people were. A single house at the top of the valley had a gigabit fibre service into it, so the task was moving that capacity down to a field, which is a radio problem rather than a civil engineering one.
- Doing it twice is materially easier than doing it once. Having deployed at Priddy the previous year we already knew where the backhaul could come from, where the radios would go and which parts of the site the terrain shadows, so the second deployment became a matter of execution rather than discovery.
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 her needs in three parts: firstly the ability to do social media on the go, telling people locally where she is; secondly the ability to advertise her own presence alongside the festival itself; and thirdly, and most bluntly, card payments, because "if we can't take card payments in this day and age, we can't trade".
The caterer running food and ice cream for the festival arrived at the same conclusion from the other direction, and traced it to a specific moment. "During COVID we stopped using cash and cards became so important," she told us, and her description of the site as she found it was unambiguous: "We're in a rural area, we don't have a Wi-Fi signal, we don't have a mobile network."
What struck us was 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 afterwards, because the SumUp records perform the stock take which determines what the festival buys the following year. The committee, meanwhile, 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
Over our presenter's left shoulder for much of the weekend sat GWS Radio, streaming sets live, and their account of the dependency was the starkest we heard. 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. Consequently 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 at the top of the valley
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 at the top of the valley 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, so what is missing is not capacity in the valley, it is any means of getting that capacity to the field where two thousand people are standing.
We therefore took that gigabit service as our backhaul, beamed 5G from the top of the valley down across the site, and used portable Wi-Fi access points to deliver it to (i) the traders and food outlets around the site, (ii) the operations and committee functions which keep the event running, and (iii) the broadcast position. The pattern is deliberately unglamorous: 5G moves the capacity and carries the site, whilst Wi-Fi does the last few metres onto the till terminals, phones and laptops which people already own, because nobody at a folk festival is going to reconfigure their payment terminal onto a new network on a Saturday morning.
The requirement which shapes every other decision is that the whole thing has to arrive, work, and leave. 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. Consequently the trade-offs we would make for a permanent rural network, where siting can be optimised over a period of months, are replaced by trade-offs which favour speed of deployment and tolerance of imperfect positions. 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.
Why the second year is a different exercise
This was our second year at Priddy, and we would observe that the second deployment differs from the first in kind rather than merely in degree. The first time, a site of this sort presents as a set of open questions: where the backhaul might come from, where the radios can usefully be placed, which parts of the site the terrain shadows, and which traders turn out to be the heavy users. The second time, all of those are known quantities, and the work shifts from discovery to execution.
That matters beyond our own convenience, because it changes what the organiser is buying. A one-off deployment asks the customer to gamble on a supplier understanding an unfamiliar site quickly, whereas a returning one behaves much more like infrastructure: the same fibre line, the same siting, the same understanding of where the demand sits, stood up again each year and taken away again afterwards. Interestingly, it is also the clearest evidence we can offer that the first year worked, since a not-for-profit raising money for local schools and music does not spend that money twice on something which disappointed it.
Conclusions
We have shown at Priddy that a rural event carrying genuinely commercial dependencies, namely card payments, committee coordination and a live radio broadcast, can be served reliably by taking existing fibre capacity from wherever it happens to have landed in the valley and moving it to where the people are. Note that very little of the difficulty lay in the technology itself; it lay in the wider context, in the simple fact that the capacity and the demand were a valley apart.
Ultimately however, the thing which stayed with us was not the technical result but the framing the caterer gave it. The connectivity was not there to improve the experience of the festival. It was there so that ice cream could be sold, so that the committee could reach one another, and so that a radio station in Glastonbury could put a folk festival on the Mendips out live. That is a utility, and it deserves to be specified, funded and relied upon as one.
We will continue to work with events of this kind, and we aim to make the pattern we used at Priddy, namely local fibre plus 5G distribution plus Wi-Fi at the edge, a repeatable one for organisers in comparable valleys. If you are running an event somewhere the public network thins out when the crowd arrives, we would be glad to talk it through.