Electric Avenue Music Festival is regarded as New Zealand’s biggest and boldest music festival featuring 50
artists, 5 stages, and 12 hours of music and art performances. This festival happens in one of New Zealand’s biggest cities Christchurch at the iconic Hagley Park which is situated in the heart of the city. The festival took place on Feb 25th, 2023, with over 30,000 people in attendance to witness this spectacle of music and arts.
The Need
The music festival is spread out over a massive area of 800m x 200m which is comprised of numerous vendor stalls and five performance stages. Considering the large area to be covered and the magnitude of the event in the city there was a requirement to have reliable Wi-Fi that was simple to deploy. The music festival had used Unifi’s Access Points for the previous 8 years, however, due to unreliable stock, lack of coverage, and difficulty of deployment a more comprehensive and reliable solution was required.
Electric Avenue Music Festival is the biggest event that happens in Christchurch and a reliable Wi-Fi connection is vital to ensure that the festival operates smoothly. The artists performing at the event and the management are particularly dependent on fast and reliable Wi-Fi to ensure that the festival takes place efficiently.
The Solution
A total of 4 GWN7660LR Long Range Access Points and 1 GWN7624 In-Wall Access Point were deployed, and these solutions were managed using Grandstream’s free GWN.Cloud platform. The GWN7660LR Access points were used to provide connectivity across the large surface area of the outdoor venue space. The GWN7624 catered to key management personnel who were situated in an indoor space with dense walls and played a pivotal role in coordinating the event.
Large Coverage Range: Considering the large square footage of open space that needed to be covered with a high-performance Wi-Fi connection, the GWN7660LR was an ideal choice for the venue. This device supports a 250m coverage range and is enabled with the latest Wi-Fi 6 technology. This large coverage range ensures that Wi-Fi is available for artists and management to use across the venue.
Strong Wi-Fi Signal and Network Speeds: The GWN7660LR provides Wi-Fi speeds of up to 1.77Gbps ensuring that fast Wi-Fi connection is available in all outdoor areas and the Wi-fi speed of 2.03Gbps ensures that a reliable network is provided to the indoor space for key management personnel. In addition to this, the 2x2:2 MU-MIMO with DL/UL OFDMA technology of the GWN7660LR and 4x4:4 MU-MIMO of the GWN7624 helps users to stay connected and receive stable connection across the venue while prioritizing more devices.
Cloud Management – Ease of Deployment: Cloud configuration and management of Grandstream’s Wi-Fi access points throughout the venue was a mandatory feature. The access points were deployed using Grandstream’s free GWN.Cloud, a cloud-based management and configuration tool for all Grandstream’s GWN Networking Solutions. The GWN.Cloud makes deployment and management of the Grandstream Access Points easy which is vital to ensure that Wi-Fi coverage is there throughout the duration of the event.
Free-of-Cost Wi-Fi Management Platform: GWN.Cloud is a free-of-cost Wi-Fi management platform making the entire solution along with the Wi-Fi 6 Access Points cost-effective which is ideal for large venues like the Electric Avenue Music Festival. There is no cost for using GWN.Cloud, and you can deploy unlimited networks and access points.
The Result
With over 9 years of deploying Wi-Fi solutions at this music festival, this is the first time that the service provider’s WiFi Guys did not have anyone contact them during the event with any issues from the deployment. The reliable stock of Grandstream also helped as the service provider was easily able to order the required solutions and ship them to the customer. Once, the password was entered into the GWN.Cloud, the management at the venue could effortlessly plug the Access Point into the network and the configuration automatically downloaded making it easy to use and deploy. The reliable stock, ease of deployment and management, and overall cost-effectiveness of the solution make Grandstream an ideal choice for Wi-Fi deployment. The music festival management team and service provider will now be using Grandstream’s Wi-Fi solutions at future events.