Henley Regatta, established in 1839, is the most prestigious rowing competitions in the world. The one mile course sees the best-of-the-best athletes competing for the coveted win.
For six days each summer, the banks of the River Thames are transformed. A 3km stretch of Henley riverside plays host to competitors, VIPs, spectators, supporters and party go-ers. It’s a great British tradition.
With attendance growing every year, connectivity had become one of the biggest operational headaches. Demand began to outstrip the available bandwidth on site, and the gap was only widening. It was becoming a real challenge for the event production teams. Enabling revenue generation was event-critical.
Several of Henley Regatta’s event production teams turned to us, drawn by our reputation for delivering reliable Wi-Fi in complex outdoor environments. Spread out along the River Thames, each were hosting their own events and audiences, buy they all individually needed a connectivity partner who could deliver reliably, without compromise.
A Connectivity challenge as unique as the event itself
Bringing together the requirements for multiple production companies gave us a clear picture of the bandwidth, coverage area and scope needed across the entire event footprint. It was a complex brief – and the stakes were high. With nightclubs and bars taking thousands of pounds each hour, any disruption to payments would have a direct and immediate impact on revenue for both traders and production companies. Getting it right wasn’t just a technical priority, it was a commercial one.
With the requirements gathered , the network design phase began six months ahead, giving us a runway to design, test and be solution-ready for the live event in June.
The existing telecoms infrastructure and 4G/5G coverage had reached its limits. Unless more bandwidth could be brought to site, connectivity would be unreliable, with too much contention for the available WiFi.
It was apparent that additional internet was requires. Site limitations meant that satellite alone would be too risky. so a fixed fibre internet solution from the opposite site of the river was also utilised to bring across additional bandwidth. A combination of fixed fibre, satellite and 4G/5G was planned, to give each event zone additional internet bandwidth, allowing for the growing demands for 2023.
The WiFi solution demanded enterprise level hardware. With two network cores installed along the length of the river, these deployments would manage the traffic, allowing it to pass without restriction. Trader devices were pre-authenticated on the network to ensure that they would stay connected, and high availability was deployed, meaning that if there was a hardware failure, the secondary core network would take over without interruption.
We covered 3km of the riverside, ensuring that every event zone had more than adequate connectivity to cope with the maximum number of people in each zone.
Core production areas were set live the day before the regatta, allowing us to test the connectivity, and ensure there would be no last-minute issues that could jeopardise the event success.
On-site support throughout the event meant that production teams could focus on running their events, knowing that we were on call for immediate support if required.
The high availability solution was a complete success. Each morning we walked the whole site to check in with each of the production companies. It was reported that there were no issues with the connectivity, something we could verify live from our on-site monitoring centre.
We were able to support with additional requirements for WiFi during the event, rather than dealing with connectivity issues.
The real success was in the increase in revenue going through the tills. A 25% increase in revenue was reported thanks to the speed of payments and 100% uptime.
More devices could connect seamlessly to the WiFi, and the general public for the first time could access WiFi.
“Wireless Solutions has delivered a truly impressive WiFi service. They get where we’re trying to go with our events, and we can have good discussions about what is achievable. I am 100% confident that if they say it’s achievable, they will deliver it to perfection. They’re dependable, honest, brilliant at what they do and a member of the team now. I recommend them to anyone looking for event connectivity.”
Now that the WiFi network has been proven, we are working to harness the potential of WiFi to drive more revenue from the event. Sponsorship, data collection, marketing opportunities, along with monitoring visitor footfall can all be driven by the WiFi network offer additional revenue for very little effort.
In 2024 we delivered a guest network with captive portal technology. Over 1700 data records were captured every day, showing just how many people were using the public guest WiFi network.
In 2025 we will work to improve the capacity for guest WiFi and scale the growth of the marketing database.
