Lost in a crowd: why phone signal is still so scarce at UK music festivals
This bank holiday weekend is one of the last big dates in the UK summer festival calendar, with Reading and Leeds, All Points East and Creamfields North expected to draw huge crowds.
With large attendance numbers at festivals come overloaded mobile phone networks, resulting in friends losing touch with one another and parents being unable to contact their teenagers on their first big weekend away at Reading and Leeds, long a bacchanalian rite of passage for post-results GCSE and A-level students.
These breakdowns in communication have become as much a fixture of UK festivals as fried halloumi and custom flags. Why, in an age of 4G and, increasingly, 5G, is this still happening?
“The reason is simply cellular capacity,” says Izzat Darwazeh, a professor of communications engineering at UCL. “People are demanding more of their phones now and want these things to be immediate. So the demand on bandwidth or capacity becomes much higher.”
Networks work on a series of cells over a specific area, and each cell works on a different frequency to neighbouring cells: imagine a honeycomb of self-contained pods. If there are too many phones in a cell, it gets overloaded. “The capacity per cell is limited,” says Darwazeh. “You can double or triple the capacity, but you can’t increase it a thousand times.” And because bodies absorb mobile signals, your phone connection becomes exponentially weaker the more people you are around, Darwazeh explains.
To remedy the issue, extra masts can be temporarily positioned where there is greatest demand. Alex Jackman, a network communications at BT Group, says: “At somewhere like Glastonbury, you are talking about dozens of stages, so you prioritise the key areas where people need signal. Each deployment that goes into the festivals is bespoke, based on where that coverage is needed.”
Glastonbury is one of the few major festivals with an “official connectivity partner” (previously EE, now Vodafone), while smaller independent festivals may be ideologically against such cosying up to a big mobile network. Local residents may oppose the installation of 5G masts.
Paul Kells, the director of network, strategy and engineering at Virgin Media O2, says COW (cells on wheels) are among the best technological answers here. “They are mobile cell towers that can be transported on trucks or trailers to provide temporary or enhanced mobile coverage in specific locations,” he says. “These are effective as they are designed for quick setup and takedown.”
Given the cost implications, mobile networks will carefully choose the events to which they bring such solutions. Darwazeh says: “A little bit of investment from these organisers can guarantee that there is good coverage, but I don’t think there’s much incentive for the mobile operators to do this.”
Topography and not being in the sightline of permanent masts, for example at a festival site surrounded by mountains, can also severely limit service.
Polly Barker, the head of production at End of the Road in rural Dorset, says the festival prioritises physical noticeboards with up-to-date information as organisers are aware that desperately oversubscribed networks mean social media posts are an inefficient communication tool. “It’s hard to give people useful updates about the festival so we have nice meeting points,” she says. “We always advise people to choose meeting points if they can’t speak to each other on their phones.”
The series of one-day events that take place in the capital over the summer – BST in Hyde Park, All Points East in Victoria Park and Wireless at Finsbury Park – are plagued by their own specific issues, while Wembley has no problem dealing with crowds of 80,000 because it uses a DAS (distributed antenna system) operated by the BT-owned EE.
“It is infrastructure built inside and around the stadium and you can give capacity to other networks to use,” says Jackman. “Whereas Hyde Park is served by three or four permanent sites that are on top of the buildings that surround it. The permanent sites aren’t built to cope with the additional 50,000
people that turn up at BST shows on a few nights of the year.”
While festival staff and crew at weekend and one-day events generally have access to wifi hotspots, making these available across a festival site is uneconomical and impractical. “Deploying many wifi antennas in a live build environment is complicated as there are so many other activities going on, from vendor setups, fencing and stages being built,” says Kells. “The wider the wifi coverage, the more complex the build plan.”
Darwazeh says that as 5G becomes more widely adopted, the densification of cells – ie more individual cells in an area covered by one network – means they will be able to handle more people and phones, and the strain on the network will become less pronounced. “A cell might have only 30 people, so the capacity can become very high,” he says. “The holy grail in mobile technology is to have one cell per user. But we’re 30 years away from this.”
When 6G rolls out in 2030, many of today’s problems will evaporate. But user behaviour will move in lockstep, with more data-heavy content in greater resolution being shared or uploaded to social platforms. Technology will still be playing catchup.
Barker suggests more people should switch off for a festival, and audience surveys by End of the Road found that attenders did not want wifi hotspots and more masts. “Do you want your audience to connect to the outside world?” she asks. “Is it actually nicer that they’re in the field and not bothered by receiving emails?”
For now, those going to festivals need to make peace with the fact that mobile reception will be as much a fitful dividend as sunny weather.