The Creative Team at Magic Box @ The Reef, an event space in Los Angeles, California, has a great article on their site about how wifi disruptions can completely vaginosisbacteriana.org upend plans for large-scale events and how to get ahead of potential problems.
The article starts with a fact that can be tough to swallow. Your event can feature fantastic presentations, popular vendors, a great location… and all of that can be overlooked by a lack of connectivity.
The unavoidable truth is, we live in a day and age where people experience things through their smartphones. Live video, social media posts, and word of mouth buzz are all powered by one thing.
You guessed it, it’s the wifi.
The different people who will be at your event will obviously have different needs when it comes to levels of connectivity and engagement. Presenters, for instance, require faster connection speeds to enable video streams and keep feeds running during presentations.
While regular attendees will be fine with a standard mobile connection, the number of attendees can slow down connection speeds. As the article says, “Some areas of your event, such as bars, lounges, banquet areas, and auditoriums, will be densely populated with many people trying to connect to wifi at the same time.”
Not to mention, are there security cameras, video display screens, or other electronic devices that will need to be connected to your network? To put it simply, being acutely aware of the scale of your event is step one when it comes to a solid wifi connection.
The article then shifts into a basic rundown of some important wifi-related jargon that those looking to plan for an event of their own should be aware of. Terms like access point, hardline, and service level agreement are all mentioned. We thought this was an especially helpful aspect of the article, because it’s easier to be taken seriously as a customer when you have the terminology of an expert in your back pocket.
Something that the article does a good job of stressing is the importance of talking to your wifi services provider, whoever you choose, and making sure that your specific connectivity and bandwidth needs are being met. As we said before, each person at your event is a potential connection, even a potential customer.
Of course, six tips can’t cover everything you need to know about internet connectivity. One thing that we noticed the article didn’t mention is the importance of understanding exactly what venues can and cannot deliver.
First of all, you need to understand that venues are, at the end of the day, in the business of promoting themselves. So, even if your venue HAS wifi that you can connect to, it might feature their logo on their splash page for login, potentially leading to confusion from attendees about just whose brand they’re actually engaging with.
From a more technical standpoint, the venue’s network may not be tuned to meet the demands of high-density events, it could lack monitoring and controls, or it could just be incredibly slow. That isn’t to scare you away from venue wifi networks, but it is to make you aware of the challenges that they present.
Each event will have different internet needs, and with Brown Pelican, you can be sure that everything will be tailored to your specific, unique requirements. Whether large-scale or small-scale, live or virtual, public or private, indoor or outdoor, we can work with you to ensure rock solid wifi for everyone involved.
Request an estimate here, or head over to our website to learn more about what exactly it is we do and to see some examples of live event wifi projects.