Hosted in Lichtenvoorde, Netherlands, the Zwarte Cross Festival is the country’s largest paid festival and the largest motor cross event in the world. The 4-day event features 31 stages that spans across 160 hectares (395 acres) and welcomes over 200K attendees every year for a cross-section of music, sports, theatre, and arts.
A popular and well-run event, the festival continues to grow each year, with the 23rd edition of the event in July 2019 seeing 220K attendees. Despite these continued successes, as the festival moved into the digitalized world we live in today the Zwarte Cross management team acknowledged their need to deploy strategic technologies to ensure a smoothly-run event and quality experience for attendees moving forward.
This includes IT networking solutions which are key to delivering a strong, value-added mobile experience to attendees while supporting the critical operations of the event. As the Official Wi-Fi Technology Partner of Zwarte Cross for the 2nd Year, Extreme Network is proud to work with Zwarte Cross’ technology team and their related partners, including Indicium B.V., to deliver another outstanding festival in 2019.
In the infographic below, we highlight some network usage takeaways from this year’s festival.
The 2019 festival marked only the second year with a custom network solution installed, but the highlighted metrics are self-evident of its value for attendees and event operations. Even though guest Wi-Fi was only available in certain areas of the expansive venue, Zwarte Cross saw an impressive 9.6 TBs of data transferred across the public Wi-Fi network. To break this down, over 3 TBs of this transferred data was a result of social media usage, while 1.3 TBs of data was from streaming content providers (iTunes, Netflix, and YouTube). These may not come as a surprise, as these usage trends are a reasonable sample size of the larger mobile behaviors displayed every day. However, it does demonstrate the importance of providing Wi-Fi access as part the guest experience today. If an organization provides the service, it will be used.
Speaking of, the public Wi-Fi network recorded an average of 12K unique Wi-Fi users a day. Peak concurrent public Wi-Fi usage at one location (in the Megatent) hit just over 1.5K, and peak concurrent Wi-Fi users across the entire festival surpassed 5K. Using ExtremeLocation, Zwarte Cross detected over 40K unique devices during the festival.
To learn more about how Zwarte Cross invests in purpose-built networking solutions to enable a quality, safe festival experience, listen to Zwarte Cross CTO Maurice Haafs describe it for himself! Check out our recorded webinar, or, take a look at the additional resources below.
Additional Resources:
