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#Glastonbury – people at the back were watching online on mobiles #glasto

I’m told that some people at Glastonbury found it easier to watch the event streaming video to their mobile phones even though they were at the gig itself.

If you were stood at the back apparently the picture on your mobile phone was bigger than the live view of the stage. I remember once going to a Bruce Springsteen gig in Roundhay Park in Leeds (some time ago now I should add). If I held up my little finger horizontally at arms length Bruce was about half the height of the fingernail.

I’d be surprised if there was much bandwidth available to stream to a mobile at Glastonbury though I suppose with the hundred and seventy seven thousand attendees I imagine the mobile networks would have stuck up another mast or two.

Anyway despite the fact that mobile data bandwidth capacity is some way behind fixed line it is one technology that I would place a big bet on for the future.

Interestingly it isn’t the actual bearer networks that have struggled during the current round of bandwidth hungry attractions such as the World Cup and Wimbledon. It is applications such as twitter that have not been able to cope. I tried to tweet a few times during the England Germany match with limited success on twitter. Other websites seemed to be unaffected.

This I’m sure is going to lead to a see saw effect – the likes of Twitter and Facebook will upgrade capacity leading to more and more mobile network bandwidth usage. Just like in the fixed broadband world really.

The measure for success will be thousands of people stood at the back at Glastonbury all happily watching the event on their smart-phone whilst still “being there”. I wonder if any reader has any direct experience of this over the weekend?

For those that weren’t there – lots of  good photos on the BBC website.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

2 replies on “#Glastonbury – people at the back were watching online on mobiles #glasto”

Oddly we built a lot of the infrastructure for the Glasto gig…. Working for a well known mobile provider!

5 mobicells linked to each other than backhaul to Bristol. 3G & 2G. Onsite all connectivity was done using multiple ADSLs (30+). Shared between BBC & the two festival comms partners. BT provide an extra rack in the Pilton exchange but this is soon to be replaced by a “free” leased line from BT. Part of a sponsorship deal with the festival.

The mobi cells peaked at just over a million call attempts on the Thursday – according to engineer.

Temp comms is a nightmare!

V interesting Loz. Thanks for the comment. I wonder whether the fibre will result in better services for the other residents of the area (if there are any left 🙂 )

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