High availability – it’s the holy grail for event connectivity. But it’s still misunderstood and under-utilised. So what does high availability mean and why should you be demanding it from your event WiFi supplier?
Let’s use an example. At a first site meeting for a new client that we are providing event connectivity for, one of their initial questions was about how we would prioritise traffic over the network to help improve performance.
🚨Alarm bells immediately ring 🚨
This single question demonstrates that their previous suppliers had been approaching their event WiFi solution all wrong. Why?
Because when we look at the performance of an event WiFi network, we need to ensure that the fundamentals are taken care of first. It’s much more important to have power, an internet connection, and the core online without fail before starting to discuss prioritising traffic. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of companies don’t address the fundamentals.
Here we share our techniques for creating the most robust ‘high availability’ WiFi networks in the event market. And by high availability, we mean networks that ARE ALWAYS online.
Our WiFi services have 99% uptime – guaranteed. And the fact of the matter is that we still hear of countless events where the WiFi network goes down, losing event producers and traders £thousands in revenue. I hope you’ll agree that network uptime is far more important than whether someone can access Facebook over someone taking a payment, right? But we’ll come on to how we handle that later.
When we look at the techniques for achieving high availability, really there is only one:
Technique 1: Increase resilience
Ask yourself:
- Is there a guaranteed power supply to the network?
- Is there a guaranteed internet connection?
- Is the core network guaranteed spec’d for the size of event?
- Are the edge services guaranteed deployed with resilience in mind?
The only way to achieve high availability is to build resilience into every aspect of your network – we’re talking power, internet, hardware and edge services.
In order for these key aspects of your network to be connected to the internet at all times, you need to address what happens if any one of them fails. Generators run out of power, internet connections can fail (a cable cut or a Satellite fails), hardware fails. If any one of these eventualities occurs, what’s your backup plan?
For us, the answer lies in providing immediate failover to a backup option for every key part of your network:
✅We use UPS’s in case of a power failure ( you’d be surprised at how often generators run out of fuel). This means our network is not at risk of going down from loss of power.
✅We have 2 internet supplies to every event site. We ensure that critical services can failover to the secondary internet connection should one fail. For some event sites, 3 internet supplies or more are supplied.
✅We have a spare network core built into every solution. Immediate failover is built in, like any corporate business that can’t afford to lose access to their systems
✅We install enough edge services (access points and switches) to allow continued connectivity should one of them fail. With backup hardware, we can replace anything that fails to ensure continuity.
This is the most important thing you should ask of any WiFi provider. What levels of resilience and availability do they work with? Check the elements above. We share more details here.
We’re going to share some other techniques to improve your network, but rather than them being ‘high availability’ they are ‘best practices’ for optimal performance.
Technique 2: Use fibre where possible
It sounds obvious when you think about it. Using a wired network to carry connectivity across your site will result in improved performance over wireless point to point links that carry data wirelessly. Some of the distances that your connectivity has to travel can be large, and with a wired network you’ll benefit from faster connectivity, be able to carry more data, better security, and less data loss.
Heavy wind or Rain can affect the signal with point-to-point links, so they’re really not best practice, but an easy option to be wary of. Check out this post on the benefit of fibre over wireless networks.
Technique 3: Use enterprise-grade hardware
At the same site that asked about prioritising traffic, they’re previous supplier was using a single prosumer router as their main connection to the internet. This hardware simply isn’t good enough for the job.
The reason we don’t discuss prioritising traffic across a network? We don’t need to. Our technology allows all traffic to flow without contention. In fact, this gives a faster network, preventing the congestion of traffic that has been throttled. Easy out, easy in, your WiFi network will thank you for it.
For us, it’s Juniper over Cisco. And it’s enterprise hardware. With engineers that are brilliant enough to know Juniper, that’s how we can build networks that meet your every need – without throttling traffic.
And the rest….
Your event site must be properly considered by someone who understands how to build an event WiFi network that is optimised for you. We’re starting to see the improved results stemming from high availability methodology, but it takes time for the market to catch up.
So spread the word, get on board and let’s upgrade the Nation’s event WiFi experiences.
