Dallas Burston Polo Club
A live events estate where over a thousand people come online at once, across several buildings and open ground.
The challenge
An events estate is one of the hardest environments in commercial Wi-Fi, because everything about the load is wrong for a conventional design. It arrives all at once rather than building through the morning. It concentrates in whichever space the event is in, then moves. It spans permanent buildings and open ground with no infrastructure. And it is visible — a guest who cannot get online at an event tells people about it.
The requirement here was coverage for over a thousand concurrent users across multiple buildings and the surrounding grounds, on one infrastructure serving guests, staff and operational systems.
What that demands of a design
Capacity, not coverage, is the governing constraint. A design that spreads a small number of access points to achieve signal everywhere will produce full bars and an unusable network the moment a crowd arrives — the airtime is finite, and it is shared. High-density design works the other way round: more access points, each covering less ground, with transmit power reduced and channel planning done carefully so they are not competing with one another.
Outdoor coverage brings its own constraints. There is no ceiling void to hide in, no convenient containment route, and no mains socket where the design wants an access point. Mounting positions, weatherproofing, power and cable routes to remote positions all have to be worked out as part of the design rather than discovered during installation.
And because bodies absorb radio energy, an empty marquee and a full one are measurably different environments. Any survey that only measures the empty site is measuring the easy case.
Our approach
- Survey the whole estate — buildings and open ground — and design to capacity targets based on expected concurrent users, not floor area
- Plan channels and transmit power deliberately across a dense deployment so access points complement rather than compete
- Design the outdoor infrastructure properly: mounting, weatherproofing, power and containment to remote positions
- Separate guest, staff and operational traffic, with bandwidth and airtime policy set at design stage
- Validate on completion, and re-check under real event load
Different building, same question.
If your site has a coverage or capacity problem, the first step is measuring it. Tell us about the building and we'll tell you which survey answers it.