Larmer Tree Festival Case Study

Larmer Tree Festival is held near Tollard Royal, a rural area with no Internet connection in place and very patchy mobile signal. Wessex Internet provided both Internet and phones to the festival organisers before the event and throughout the five-day festival.

Larmer Tree Festival is a five-day music and arts festival held at the Larmer Tree Gardens near Tollard Royal on the Wiltshire-Dorset border. Held annually and now in its 26th year, the festival attracts up to 4,000 revellers per day.

The Problem

Larmer Tree Gardens in Cranborne Chase, where the festival is held, is a rural area with no internet connection in place. Setting up and running a festival requires a lot of communication, both internally and externally. Festival organisers wanted Internet and phone access for the week leading up to the event and throughout the five-day festival itself, so we sent our engineers out a week before to get them connected.

Our Solution

This is the third year that we have provided Internet and phones for Larmer Tree Festival. In past installations we used Wessex Internet for Internet connectivity to support Gamma hosted phones. In this particular DBX deployment, Larmer Tree forwarded all their main headquarters’ office calls to our trunks, so that normal calls could be answered on location. The Internet is delivered using a combination of line-of-sight wireless technology and fibre.

We provided Larmer Tree with fibre and wireless Internet links to their temporary offices and press areas. We also provided Wi-Fi points and VoIP phones in their temporary cabins. 11 VoIP phones were set up on 5th July, spread accross 2 temporary cabins. An additional 2 phones were set up on 8th July, to connect the Box Office and Wristband Exchange.

The Result

Our solution allowed Larmer Tree’s press team to upload PR, photos and videos during the event. It also allowed the entire production team to relocate on site early, allowing the eTicketing systems to communicate. The VoIP phones and Wi-Fi hotspots allowed the team to communicate wherever they were on site, as the festival was held in an area with patchy mobile internet signal.

Eve Russell, Production Coordinator for the festival said, ”Wessex Internet provided a great service for us at the festival this year. It is vital to the smooth implementation of the festival that we have a secure and reliable Internet connection.”