Festival tech is now a success
It's been a few short years since I've attended a music festival, and things have changed. Especially when it comes to mobile connectivity.
I might be dating myself here, but the classic music festival expectation has always been no phone reception for pretty much the whole time you're away. At least through the majority of my adult life.
Yet at Wilderness Festival held in rural Oxfordshire last week, I was getting speeds of over 600 Mbps, and even a consistent 100 Mbps for uploads.
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For reference, I frequently travel different parts of the UK and carry SIMs for all major providers, and its the absolute exception to gets download speeds over 70 Mbps. On average I'm looking at 10-20 Mbps, often less.
Temporary Towers and Phone Fun
Fiona Jackson at TechHQ has a great look at temporary mobile towers setup for Glastonbury in recent years, and given the last festival I attended was 2019, I guess I missed a lot in the 2020–2024 gap.
Looming over the family campsite where I stayed at Wilderness Festival were two large masts for phone coverage. If there were others situated around the arena or campsites, I couldn't say. I didn't see any, but it's possible.
Other tech 'innovations' prevalent at this year's Wilderness, and no doubt many other festivals:
Carrier Sponsorship
Mobile company Three - best known for having terrible phone reception outside of cities - sponsored this year's Wilderness Festival. Did they see the irony, or were they tackling the perception head-on? I couldn't say.
As part of the Three sponsorship, the company had its own own chill and charge zones that for people to visit with couches, super fast WiFi, (paid) mobile battery pack rental, but perhaps most importantly:
Free eSIM
Three had QR codes posted around the festival to pick up a free, 7 day unlimited data eSIMs. This is an offer listed online for other festivals they sponsor too: Parklife, Reading, Wireless, and a few others.
Here's the banner I used to test the eSIM:
And did it work? Flawlessly.
No sneaky requests for personal info, no credit card details, literally nothing. Just one tap to open the QR code, one tap to accept installing an eSIM, and then we're up to the usual eSIM activation and settings screens.
Within 2 minutes I had a fully functioning eSIM which in my testing, had the fastest connection out of the other SIMs I brought with me: GiffGaff (O2), Vodafone, and EE.
Three sent multiple text messages with prompts about how to add credit or start using this eSIM longer-term. But I didn't have to do a single thing to use it for the festival, and discard when I left.
Had I not used Three before and found the coverage woeful, I'd have been so impressed I might have considered becoming a customer.
Other festival tech stuff
In no particular order.
Apple Maps integration in the app on iOS. So way finding worked well, rather than a sort of 'roll your own' style mapping which often lacks polish.
anyway, here's Basement Jaxx:
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Addendum
I know festivals and any profit making outing these days have to be sponsored to cover costs, but replacing The Spectacle (a large group performance on the Saturday night) with the 'Audi Wonder parade' (dancers and costumed performers ushering an electric Audi vehicle around the grounds) felt like a higher tier corporate sellout than I was expecting.