The Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History is a museum of African-American history and culture in Detroit, Michigan. Each year it holds the African World Festival, a three-day celebration honouring the African Diaspora with performances, vendors, food and more. The festival draws more than 25,000 attendees to open festival grounds, where dozens of food, merchandise and service vendors trade alongside live performances, security operations and live streaming.

Temporary events present a distinct set of connectivity hurdles, and the African World Festival in Detroit, which attracts over 25,000 attendees annually, had them all. The festival grounds had no wired internet service, no established power lines and no Ethernet drops for WiFi deployment, so the network had to be built from nothing in an open-air environment with high interference levels.

Demand was heavy and varied. Thousands of attendees, staff and vendors needed simultaneous access. Dozens of food, merchandise and service vendors depended on stable internet for credit card processing and mobile payments. Real-time communications, security systems and live streaming feeds all relied on uninterrupted high-speed internet. Installation and teardown had to be fast, with only a narrow window for deployment.

The stakes were high. A drop in connectivity could mean lost revenue for vendors, frustrated guests, loss of emergency communications for event planners and a diminished reputation for the event. The organisers had zero tolerance for outages.

Metro Wireless delivered a managed WiFi solution built on a layered strategy tailored to the event's environment and users, with speed, scalability and stability as the design goals. It began with pre-event discovery, working with the organisers to estimate data usage and connected devices, set bandwidth requirements for staff, vendors and guests, identify critical services such as point-of-sale, security and live video that needed priority connections, and analyse terrain, coverage zones and interference.

From those findings Metro Wireless engineered a custom temporary network. A fixed wireless dedicated internet access circuit with symmetrical bandwidth provided the primary connection. Cellular 5G/LTE broadband served as failover and was bonded with the fixed wireless circuit to increase total bandwidth. Enterprise-grade networking equipment, including point-to-multipoint wireless backhaul and WiFi access points, was chosen to handle thousands of simultaneous users securely, and multiple failover and self-healing paths were built in so the network would stay up even if one point failed.

Metro Wireless technicians installed the infrastructure two days before the event, coordinating with the client's event team on access point placement for maximum coverage, LAN placement for routers, switches and power supplies, and configuration of traffic management for bandwidth prioritisation. The company's Network Operations Center monitored the network 24/7 for live support and issue detection, and on-site technical staff handled real-time issues and requests throughout the festival.

• Zero internet outages across the festival weekend, thanks to network redundancy and on-site support
• Over 95% of vendors ran PoS terminals and digital payment platforms on Metro Wireless-provided internet
• Transactions processed without interruption, boosting vendor sales and customer satisfaction
• Event staff used the network for real-time coordination; security teams kept access to cameras and check-in systems
• Thousands of festival-goers shared live posts, stories and videos, lifting social media engagement beyond the site
• Infrastructure installed just two days before the event, with 24/7 NOC monitoring and on-site technicians