Chiddfest is an outdoor music festival held every July. Every year we turn up at the start of the week and stand up a temporary, festival-grade network from scratch — site-wide secure Wi-Fi, redundant internet feeds, HA firewalling and engineers on the ground for the duration. By Friday evening, when the first band hits the stage, it looks and behaves like a permanent enterprise estate. By Monday morning it doesn't exist any more.
That cycle — a field to a fully-resilient network and back — is its own discipline. It's not the same as installing kit in a school over the summer holidays, and it's not the same as supporting a hotel. It's a deployment class on its own, and we run it every year.
What event Wi-Fi has to do
- Context:
Stand up fast — the site is a green field at the start of the week. By Friday the network has to be live, resilient and secure
- Issue:
No second chances — the bands play whether the network's ready or not, and a one-weekend festival can't tolerate the kind of outage a permanent estate can ride out
- Goal:
Internet diversity that actually diverges — multiple feeds, on different physical media, so a single circuit fault, weather event or cell-tower hiccup doesn't take the whole festival offline
- Context:
High-density Wi-Fi outdoors — thousands of unowned devices, on an open site, with no walls to fall back on for coverage limits
- Context:
Pack everything down on Monday — the kit has to leave the site cleanly, ready to come back next year
How it goes in, every year
The pattern is sharpened by repetition. Same engineering team, same playbook, smarter every July than it was the one before.
Diverse internet — three ways in, bonded into one
Multi-feed internet is the foundation. Redundant Starlink dishes, cellular WAN and a 60 GHz microwave point-to-point link feed in from three physically diverse paths. Our WAN bonding technology aggregates the lot into a single logical link — roughly 500 Mbps of usable bandwidth summed across the three sources rather than one circuit picked at a time, with automatic failover sitting behind it. A storm can blink one of them; the festival doesn't notice, and the headline number is bigger than any single circuit could deliver on its own.
Miles of copper and fibre, dropped in for the weekend
The festival has to be wired before it can be wireless. Temporary structured cabling runs across the site — fibre to the right aggregation points, copper to the access points and the tents that need it. Pulled in, tested, weather-proofed and tagged on the way through.
20+ access points, designed with Ekahau
The wireless design is modelled in Ekahau before anyone gets on site — coverage, capacity, channel plan, AP placement, the lot. Twenty-plus access points go in to match the model. Every year we adjust against the previous year's data; every year the coverage and density get better.
HA firewalling and resilient core
A high-availability firewall pair runs the perimeter. Multiple WAN connections terminate in to it; failover is automatic and fast. The core gear is sized for the festival's peak — redundant uplinks, hot spares on hand, configurations versioned so a swap-out is a 60-second exercise, not a problem.
Eyes on glass, all weekend
Once it's live we don't disappear. Engineers stay on site for the duration. The platform is monitored proactively, capacity is tuned in real time against what the crowd actually does, and if something needs adjusting we adjust it before the audience feels it. Tech support is in person, in a branded shirt, not on a phone tree.
Branded guest portal — our own software
Attendees sign in through M/agnet, our in-house guest hotspot software. Festival-branded splash screen, consent captured properly, returning attendees recognised without re-authenticating, and an auditable marketing list at the end of the weekend. M/agnet replaces what would otherwise be a stock vendor portal with something that feels like part of the festival, not part of the Wi-Fi kit.
Built in-house
The captive portal isn’t off-the-shelf. M/agnet handles branding, consent, returning-guest recognition, vouchers and audit trail — built so the experience matches the festival, not the network gear underneath. More on M-Tech Labs →
What the festival gets
A network that stays up
Three diverse upstream paths, HA firewalling and twenty-plus Ekahau-designed access points add up to a festival where the network is the bit nobody has to think about. No single point of failure on Friday becomes the festival's problem on Saturday.
Real wireless capacity in an outdoor space
Coverage and capacity modelled before the kit ships, then tuned against the actual crowd once they're on site. Outdoor Wi-Fi at festival density done properly — not a single SSID and a prayer.
Trade and crew connectivity that works
Box office, bars, production, security, food and drink traders, the merch tent — they all need to be able to take card, scan tickets, run radios, talk to the cloud. The network's there for them, not just for the audience.
On-site engineering, all weekend
The team's on the ground. If something needs tuning, we tune it. If a circuit blips, we route around it. If a trader can't take card, we sort it. In person, not by ticket.
A playbook that gets sharper every year
Same team, same site, same playbook — repeated and refined. Each year's deployment is faster, denser, more resilient and better-instrumented than the one before.
Platform at a glance
- Event
- Chiddfest — annual outdoor music festival
- Cadence
- Site built up Monday-Thursday, live Friday-Sunday, struck down on Monday — every July
- Internet diversity
- Redundant Starlink terminals, cellular WAN, 60 GHz microwave point-to-point link — three physically diverse paths bonded into a single ~500 Mbps aggregated link, with automatic failover
- Cabling
- Temporary structured cabling — fibre to the aggregation points, copper to the APs and tented services
- Wireless
- 20+ access points, designed and validated in Ekahau, tuned on the day
- Perimeter
- HA firewall pair with multi-WAN failover and policy management
- Guest experience
- M/agnet — M-Tech's in-house guest hotspot platform — festival-branded captive portal, consent capture, returning-guest recognition and end-of-event marketing list
- Operating model
- On-site engineers for the duration of the festival, proactive monitoring, real-time capacity tuning, in-person tech support
- Pack-down
- Site fully reverted on Monday — back to a field
In numbers
- 02 / 04Physically diverse upstream paths — Starlink, cellular and 60 GHz microwave0
- 03 / 04Ekahau-designed Wi-Fi access points across the site20+
- 04 / 04Logical link out of all three — single bonded WAN, automatic failover0
Why event Wi-Fi is its own discipline
Event Wi-Fi is one of the harder deployment classes in the field. The site changes shape every year. The crowd density is unpredictable until they show up. The kit lives outside. The build window is days. And the consequences of a fault don't roll back to next week — the band's already playing, the bar's already serving, the gates are already open.
That's why we treat it as its own practice rather than as an extension of the standard managed-services bench. Festivals don't reward generalists. Chiddfest is where we sharpen the playbook, and where the technology gets to do what it's supposed to do: stay invisible, and let the festival happen.
In memoriam
John “Billy” Biles
8th January 1961 – 14th September 2025
A master of perfection on our connections team. The nickname came from his years on police firearms, where shouting “John” into a radio rarely narrowed the field down; among us it stuck for the same reason every nickname does, because everyone called him it.
He arrived at M-Tech swearing blind that he was a complete technophobe. He went from scribe-and-scroll to iPad almost subconsciously, picking up the tools as he went without ever quite admitting to himself how much of a techie he’d become. A top, top chap.
And he watched out for everyone. He had a quiet obsession with making sure his colleagues were OK — always asking how somebody was getting on, always one eye on the welfare of the rest of the team.
The work of his hands is still up on this site, and on a lot of others. He’s missed, by everyone who worked with him.
