Sundance Film Festival Uses Wi-Fi For 3G Data Offload
Ruckus Wireless deployed a large-scale, high-speed public Wi-Fi network at the Sundance Film Festival, offloading terabytes of data from local cellular networks.
“Having some 50,000 people converge on this little mountain town over a week and a half creates huge problems for anyone trying to get reliable broadband access,” said Justin Simmons, associate director of IT at Sundance, in a statement. “Last year it was nearly impossible to even make a cell phone call.”
For the first time this year, the Sundance Film Festival deployed and featured an advanced public Wi-Fi network, based on patented Smart Wi-Fi technology from Ruckus Wireless. The Ruckus ZoneFlex dual-band 802.11n network provided indoor/outdoor coverage to nearly 15,000 mobile device users in over a dozen remote venues over the 10-day event.
The Wi-Fi supported 15,000 users and 2.5 terabytes of data over a 10-day period, with an average of 1,480 users per day. It offloaded an average 220 GB of data from the 3G network each day and handled 300+ GB during peak traffic times, which lasted several hours each day.