Challenge
Crowded festivals often draw hundreds of thousands of people to remote areas that struggle to provide adequate cell phone service.
Outcome
Taara worked with T-Mobile at two major events in the U.S. to provide 5G broadband connectivity using Taara’s wireless optical solution that was quick and easy to install.
Taara provides connectivity during the Albuquerque Balloon Festival.
Connecting in a crowd
The influx of people at festivals and other crowded events often leads to overloaded cell networks, making it difficult to secure a reliable connection if high bandwidth backhaul connectivity is not available. The team at Taara, X’s moonshot for connectivity, wanted to alleviate this problem.
“We've all been there – stuck in a crowd at a concert, a baseball game or other large-scale events, struggling to share a video clip or connect with friends because the cell network is jammed,” says Taara General Manager Mahesh Krishnaswamy. “And as people continue to consume more data, this challenge will only become more prevalent unless high capacity backhaul networks are implemented to provide a seamless end user experience.”
Taara’s mission is to deliver fast, affordable, and abundant connectivity to people wherever and whenever they need it. Taara uses beams of light to deliver high-speed, high-capacity connectivity over long distances. For the past few years, the team has been working with partners around the world, from rural India to urban Kenya to the Congo River, to pilot and refine Taara’s technology for a variety of applications.
“Taara has demonstrated that it is an incredibly flexible connectivity solution,” Mahesh explains. “Taara can be deployed as a viable alternative to laying fiber across challenging terrain like rivers or canyons, supply reliable 5G and broadband backhaul, connect islands to one another, and has even been used to quickly bring communities back online after natural disasters.”
More recently, the team has been working to provide festival-goers with fast, reliable service at two of the most remote and popular events in the U.S.: Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival and the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.
“These multi-day festivals attract hundreds of thousands of people, and laying fiber isn’t an option,” Mahesh says. “When T-Mobile reached out to our team to see if we could support these marquee events, I was confident that our technology would deliver.”
Since Taara’s technology can be deployed quickly and easily, it’s a natural fit for temporary gatherings that draw large crowds. The team worked with T-Mobile to install Taara terminals at both the music and balloon festivals so participants could experience fast, low latency 5G connectivity.
“To support these events, we needed to deliver high capacity backhaul to enable 5G broadband connectivity in locations where cell service has typically been difficult,” Mahesh says. “At both festivals, we were able to give attendees ultra-fast 5G connectivity with greater than 99.9% uptime, so they had no problems taking photos, capturing videos, and staying connected. In Albuquerque, for instance, Taara’s links handled one million sessions over the course of nine days.”
Fast, flexible, high capacity connectivity on demand
Taara uses an invisible laser beamed through the air to send 20 Gbps of high-speed connectivity between two terminals up to 20 km apart. The terminals are lightweight and can be installed and taken down within a matter of hours.
At the balloon festival, the team installed a Taara terminal at a fiber access point two kilometers away from the festival grounds and aligned it with a second terminal at a T-Mobile “COW” (cell on wheels) stationed close to the event. For the Coachella deployment, the team placed a Taara terminal on a cell tower designed to look like a palm tree, which then connected to another terminal about one kilometer away, on T-Mobile’s COW.
“To accommodate the Coachella Valley's strong and gusty winds, and the temporary nature of the towers deployed at the event, we provided a robust solution which resulted in a reliable service, and delivered a true broadband experience to the concertgoers,” Mahesh explains.
A Taara terminal installed at Coachella.
The Taara team has worked hard to understand and address myriad challenges facing connectivity providers, such as when it’s prohibitively difficult to lay fiber, when carriers need a temporary or permanent fiber backup, or when wireless solutions lack the needed capacity. Taara’s stable, high throughput backhaul solution is cost effective and fast to deploy and redeploy.
“We’ve made great progress during the past few years advancing what’s possible with our technology, particularly around refining pointing and tracking capabilities, mitigating environmental impacts, and developing new network management and planning tools,” says Mahesh. “We remain as focused as ever on bridging the digital divide, wherever and whenever it occurs.”
If your organization is seeking new solutions for better connectivity, please get in touch at taarateam@x.team.