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Ask Slashdot: 4G Networking Advice For Large Outdoor Festival?
New submitter xanadu113 writes "I help out with a large outdoor festival each year (Seattle Hempfest), and we use 4G hotspots on-site for our internet needs. Due to being at the bottom of the hill (in Myrtle Edwards park in downtown Seattle, WA right on the sound), we have problems with loss of signal, bandwidth switching (going between 4G/3G/2G, etc.). As wireless internet is our only option on site, we need to do something about improving the signals. What would be the best way to do a site survey of the 4G signals to select the best locations for hotspots, as well as the best carrier to use? We need potentially up to 10 devices per hotspot, and up to 10 hotspots or so. Also, would putting up a 4G repeater be a good option to solve this problem?"
WiFi is going to be cheaper.
If you are near sprint coverage you can get and rent a tower on a truck that may solve the 4g issue for the entire area. Then your hot spots could be anywhere. I don't know the cost on this though, just know they have it.
even if you land up having %carrier% signs all around the place and %carrier% logo lighters and such you might land up having your carrier setup a portable tower or something Commercial Grade.
what are the maths involved? (most important you need to cover which bits of ground??)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
Talk to the major cell providers, get some Celltowers On Wheels. They loves them some COW events, every COW is a dozen overage charges waiting to happen.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
With so many people at the festival, they will easily eat up the cellular connection with their cell phones, so you really shouldn't rely on 4g or any cellular broadband source.
I would recommend finding a wireless carrier that can send you internet via 5.8ghz or 3.65ghz (wimax). Once you have a source at the fest, you would want to redistribute it yourself to various locations for your hotspots at different venues by using an Access Point at each location. You should use a 5.8ghz bridge to redistribute it through the site but you would want to site survey first. Look into Ubiquiti products - easy to use.
Alternatively, instead of going to an expensive wireless carrier to send you bandwidth to the site, you could find somebody that owns a house or business with a good cable internet connection and redistribute down to the fest yourself using 5.8ghz bridging.
Good luck. And P.S. don't waste your time trying to fix the 4g issue - its a lost cause when too many people are in the area taking up the signal.
2013 Schedule (August 16-August 18)
The problem with most terminal equipment is not so much location, but the quality of the antenna used. Most phones these days have absolutely pitiful antennas which is alleviated somewhat by the use of a flat copper helix stuck on the back of the battery. Or, in the case of such phones as the iPhone, which do not come with removable covers never mind removable batteries, stuck to the back of the case.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
Just ask the NSA for assistance; I'm sure they'd be more than happy to provide all the IT assistance you could possibly need. :)
Why would a bunch of stoners need high speed internet? I can imagine maybe one user typing 'hey' and another user typing 'dude' a half hour later, but if there is any more activity than that, then the fest is a dud...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
This event is an excellent candidate for a temporary cellular deployment, engineered and operated by a carrier. Typically, they will not charge for the service because of the extra call revenue and to avoid bad publicity from poor coverage or capacity. Unfortunately, you would need to engage both Verizon and AT&T to provide service for their own customers.
I recommend not deploying a cellular repeater in this case because there is likely insufficient isolation between the surrounding macro network and your event site. Without sufficient isolation, the repeater will impair the operation of the host base station and not even provide significant coverage improvement due to massive multipath problems. If you're interested in a survey, you could use an Android phone with RF Signal Tracker and record the RSCP and Ec/Io of UMTS ("3G") service.
If the carriers are not interested, I recommend deploying your own Wi-Fi network. I cannot offer advice on how many access points you would need, but it will be many. Because Wi-Fi was never meant to be infrastructure and lacks features like uplink scheduling and handover, controlling the footprint of each access point is very important.
Also check out WIDI. CLEAR is in the area. The local ISP's can provide a drop for a fee to feed a few WIFI hotspots. Cell capacity has limits for large festivals. Use alternatives when possible.
FYI, check the local thrift shops for used CLEAR modems. Monthly service is possible. Combined with a 2nd hand wireless router, the modem and router can often be operated just fine on a 12 volt battery.
The truth shall set you free!
I've used this method to find celltowers closest to a house in a forest. On your cellphone, turn off GPS and google location services, and go into airplane mode.
Then turn off airplane mode and as soon as it connects try to get a fix on your position in google maps using only celltower information. Basically, it'll place you a certain distance within range of a celltower. The center of the circle is where the tower is. If you can get LOS on that tower, that will help your signal a lot. Sometimes they're even marked in google maps. You can move around the perimeter, and it may switch to a different cell indicating another tower you can use. Not all carriers use the same celltowers, either, so this has to be the same provider you have for your hotspots.
If you really want to play around to increase signal, try mounting an old satellite dish up high aiming directly at the celltower, and place the hotspot at the focal point.
A 4G repeater won't help since you'd have to place it in LOS to the tower anyway, so you might as well just place your hotspot and a wifi repeater there with a directional antenna. Wifi equipment should be cheaper and faster, too, for the infrastructure.
True, but I'm getting a head start on the 2014 (August 15-17, always the third weekend in August) Hempfest... ;)
-Myke
It's funny how the "non potheads" can't think outside the box enough to realize this is for the 2014 Hempfest, not the 2013 one which ended last weekend on the 18th... ;)
-Myke
(replying to myself)
Seattle being a major town with a known tech history, there's indeed a community wireless ISP, called "Seattle Wireless" and I'm sure they can be helpful. Or even have some people there quite interested
I live just a few blocks from the park (and staffed a table on Sunday of the event), the 4G problems are not due to coverage but due to network congestion. You can easily get 10-15 Mbps via both Clear and Verizon 4G when there aren't 50k people there. You really should be looking at point to point microwave for your backhall. I'm sure Spectrum Networks can provide you with a 1Gbps link on at least the south half of the park. Digital Fortress has a datacenter in the big black round building that overlooks the park. I suspect they could get you roof access and a 1Gbps feed too. Most of the buildings along the park belong to tech companies (F5 networks, Big Fish Games). If you can talk one of them into sponsoring you, they could likely get you bandwidth on their roofs too. Bandwidth isn't a problem, you just need to bring your own. Obviously that requires money and forward planning.
The person asking the question thinks the solution to needing to provide Wifi Hotspots is to use cellular based devices and maybe try to find a way to get better 4G coverage.
You're trying to solve the wrong problem. Using 4G to provide wifi has several drawbacks, first is cost. Second, you can't get the bandwidth you really need, and third, you have to compete with every device there trying to connect to thier cellular provider. Provide hotspots with Wifi Routers getting their connections from a wired source instead. Ideally, you'd run wires to your wifi access points but if you can't do that very well in some places, use wifi repeaters.
If putting wires to the places you need access points is really a serious problem that you can't solve with wifi repeaters, then use microwave. It's not too expensive to set up and it can give you a no-wires high bandwidth internet connection for long distances.
Since the wrong question was asked, it is hard to provide the right answer, but here are some tips:
B) Eliminate all the stupid users. This is frowned upon by society.
Repeaters are for boosting individual signals. They often promise extended range and coverage, but do nothing for added capacity. If you're in a bit of a low coverage area chances are your repeater will lock onto a handful of towers. Suddenly presenting the network infrastructure with 100 new devices at one node will result in very poor quality of service. Only a handful of devices will work at any given time and they will likely chop and change where one device suddenly has massive bandwidth and a second later no signal. We just did something similar at a local event out west. We had roughly 100 people there, and one of them was a network engineer at one of our telcos. Basically he put it up for emergency use only. If more than 5 people tried to use it at a time the system went splat and would take a while to come good again.
What you need is proper infrastructure with portable cell towers backhauling the data to the network, not repeaters which suddenly present a load onto a cell tower which was never in their design case. I would suggest contact the telcos and see if they can provide something like this. For a big enough event and some free advertising you may be in luck.
Nice, good linkage.
First, why not engage the community like Seattle Wireless to see if they're willing to setup a mesh in the park. They're a non-profit, your a non-profit...
I don't think your end goal was to provide coverage for everyone. If you have a bunch of people watching netflix while at the park, then why have live entertainment? Having a bunch of people all wired in would harsh my buzz instead of it being a social event.
Understandably for concessions, you'll need wifi or connectivity of somekind to keep capitalism alive. For that you can set up a small wifi-mesh across the concessions which are at the south end of the park and link it to one of the buildings up the hill via point-to-point mesh. That way you're not having to cover the entire length of the park (where there is still minimal coverage for 911/sms/etc. services) and still have something a little quicker than dialup for the vendors who paid money to setup stands for the event.
I doubt you want the event donation fees being swallowed up by trying to setup something elaborate when business functional will do.
boom goes the dynamite....
Going on right now (well, starting soon) is the greatest wild party in the middle of nowhere, 2 hours from the closes cell signal, and they have internet access. Ask some of the Burning Man guys to help with such a setup. They don't use 4G, but they have T1s in nearby towns and they microwave it out to the festival site. It works very well, even in the worst dust storms, and is not nearly as reliant on the whims of cellular carriers.
True, but I'm getting a head start on the 2014 (August 15-17, always the third weekend in August) Hempfest... ;)
You do know that by Aug 2014 no one will be attending the festival in person. They'll be strapping on Oculus III's and attending in VR.
You prolly won't need them, COWs are self-contained, with their own generators and everything. They're really designed to get cell service restored ASAP when a tower goes down, so have no time to worry about power or other crud, just find a high point, park the truck and get it lit.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you