03/07/2025
"We have good mobile coverage for our event, we don't need help"
We hear this one often and on the surface, it appears to be correct, however many events find out later on that’s not the whole story.
Mobile communications masts have finite resources, to get round this their time is split into slots, each device gets a slot, then the next device gets served and so on. This is then mixed in with the ability of the mast to divide the area around it into "sectors", this is why the antenna are arranged as they are. This works well when devices are spread out. However, when a sector gets crowded devices have to start waiting for timeslots. This can be done fairly but often it becomes "who shouts the loudest".
What does this look like? Well in reality just a few hundred devices can flood a sector/mast. When this happens, it can take minutes for just one device to get any data out, your event quickly becomes a mobile blackspot, even with devices showing full signal. A site that had full 5G coverage with massive amounts of bandwidth 24 hours ago can become useless. This will cause transactions on card machines to time out, call failures and complete loss of connectivity despite having those magical full bars.
We get round this by managing our own network to be fair and configured specifically to the needs of payment machines. Events where satellite or fixed broadband is available it can become an issue quickly without careful management, and this management is our "secret sauce" allowing us to guarantee fair access to all.
