North Tyneside Council Chooses Aspire to Power Festival Connectivity

The Challenge

The setting that makes the Mouth of the Tyne Festival unique also creates a significant connectivity challenge.

The venue for Month of the Tyne Festival, Tynemouth Priory, sits in an exposed coastal location, where mobile signal and connectivity is extremely limited. As an English Heritage site, any technical deployments onsite can’t be intrusive, run underground or interfered with the site. The logistical challenges of working on such as site require tremendous planning and execution to ensure reliable solutions, delivered in a safe way.

As the festival has evolved and grown over the years, the lack of connectivity became an operational issue. Vendors increasingly relied on electronic payments, creating a high demand for reliable network access across the site.

Visitor expectations evolved too. Thousands of people now attend expecting access the internet, allowing them to share content from the festival. Connectivity needs now extend far beyond event operations alone.

The festival now depends on connectivity capable of supporting public Wi-Fi and securely segregated vendor services, alongside the wider technology infrastructure used across the site.

Each festival also presents a different challenge. Site layouts change and requirements evolve from year to year, requiring detailed planning well ahead of the event.

Aspire’s Solution

Aspire provides high-capacity connectivity directly into the Mouth of the Tyne Festival site, building on its wider network partnership with North Tyneside Council.

Fibre connectivity is brought onto the site and extended to the festival stage, providing the bandwidth required to support a major event attended by around 100,000 people.

Aspire also works closely with Extreme Networks to deploy wireless access points across the venue, providing fast Wi-Fi for visitors while supporting dedicated connectivity for festival vendors.

Public and vendor networks are segregated, helping provide the secure connectivity required for payment processing without compromising the public Wi-Fi experience.

Planning begins around six months before the festival. Aspire works with North Tyneside Council and Extreme Networks to adapt the deployment to the changing site layout and requirements of each year’s event.

The result is a venue that has progressed from having almost no usable connectivity to supporting a sophisticated digital environment throughout the four-day festival.

Working with Aspire

The Mouth of the Tyne Festival builds on a wider connectivity partnership between Aspire and North Tyneside Council.

Aspire provides the fibre network connecting key Council locations across the borough, including schools and sheltered accommodation, back to its corporate network.

At the festival, that relationship brings together the Council’s understanding of the event with Aspire’s connectivity expertise and technology from Extreme Networks.