Clair Global was engaged by Latitude 38 Entertainment (L38), part of Live Nation Entertainment, for the eighth year to provide data solutions to three-day music and food festival, BottleRock Napa Valley.
Building on decades of live event expertise, Clair Global’s data services enhanced the festival experience for 45,000 attendees who came to watch an eclectic line up of musical talent, including Clair Global touring clients Stevie Nicks, Megan Thee Stallion, The Offspring and Queens of the Stone Age.
Clair Global engineers built the network infrastructure to support production connectivity needs around the festival venue, the Napa Valley Expo, before deploying specific solutions for food and drink vendors, access control locations, and site wide attendee WiFi, using enterprise grade network equipment overseen by a crew of 14.
Clair Global relies heavily on the reliability and performance of Cisco network equipment. Cisco, a festival sponsor, has been showcasing new technologies at the event for some years, partnering with Clair for deployment expertise. Demonstrating Cisco Meraki’s cloud capabilities, the enhancement to high density Wi-Fi connectivity with Wi-Fi 6, and automatic onboarding efficiencies of open roaming, Cisco is now able help make BottleRock one of the most connected festivals on the planet.
Clair Global Account Manager, Ethan Quint, commented: “Clair has some very smart and capable network engineers who have designed these systems and their deployment methods. Having over 60 years of heritage has been invaluable to our data solutions; touring and packaging these systems, deploying them rapidly to rig and tear down is what makes our service stand out.”
Tasked with laying out an enterprise grade system to support the event is achieved through tailor made, proprietary mounting hardware and enclosures for WiFi access points, before fitting neatly into production trucks during load-out.
Clair’s ability to package data networks with the reliability needed – often in adverse conditions such as relying on temporary power and employing back-up batteries – has led to a robust redundancy strategy, enabling the team to succeed consistently.
Quint continued: “We are always bettering how our large-scale network services could be configured from a technical standpoint to minimise downtime. Some of the bigger things that add to our resiliency on the network besides power back-up, is innovatively weather proofing the equipment from heat, dust, and rain hazards.”
BottleRock’s dedication to the fan experience is exemplary, as Quint concluded: “We have more end user devices on this network than at any other event Clair Global works across. BottleRock is unique in that it uses a mixture of cellular and WiFi, meaning if thousands of audience members want to live stream the concerts to their social media channels, they can – the connectivity is seamless!”
The weekend following BottleRock, L38 produced Latin festival La Onda on the same site, once again requesting the services of Clair Global’s data engineers.
