Trader WiFi at North East Dog Festival

Dawn Oliver and Rebecca Earle on why they brought WiFi to a 20 acre field in Northumberland, and what changed for their traders.

The site

Dawn Oliver and Rebecca Earle started the North East Dog Festival because there was nothing like it in the region. Two people, no big team, no budget, and a belief that dog owners in the North East deserved a proper festival. Eleven years later it fills a 20 acre field at Kirkley Hall for a weekend every summer. The field is also the problem.

The problem

For the first several years, connectivity was the recurring complaint. Not from a technical team, but from the two groups whose experience decides whether an event works: traders and visitors.

The feedback was consistent. The WiFi was not good. The 5G was not good. And once several thousand people arrived on site, whatever signal existed disappeared entirely, because everybody’s phone was competing for the same rural cell.

That is a commercial problem rather than a comfort one.

No signal means no card payments. No card payments at a rural site with no cash machine means traders lose sales they cannot recover, and visitors walk away from stands they wanted to buy from. It hits the traders with higher-value stock hardest, because those are exactly the purchases nobody has cash for.

The survey

Before anything was quoted, we walked the site.

You cannot plan coverage for a 20 acre field from a PDF. Where the ground rises and falls, where the trading rows will sit, how far it really is from the gate to the far hedge, what the tree line does to a signal. None of that is on a site plan, and all of it changes the design.

What we built

The site has no usable line and no reliable mobile coverage under load, so the connection comes in over Starlink, which does not depend on local masts and therefore does not care how many people are stood in the field.

Distributing that connection across the site is the harder half of the job. The build is:

• →15 Ubiquiti UniFi access points placed across the trading rows, the main gate and the event management area
• →Over 900 metres of Cat5e run across the site to reach them
• →Separate networks so trader card payments and the gate are kept apart from everything else, and cannot be slowed down by anything sharing the site
• →An engineer on site for the full weekend, not on the end of a phone

Coverage on a spread-out showground is a distribution problem rather than a capacity one. The access points are the straightforward part. Getting a usable signal out to the far corners of 20 acres is what the 900 metres of cable is for.

What changed

The first year the network went in, the complaints stopped. Traders could take cards. The main gate could take card payments. And the organisers stopped fielding the one piece of feedback they had been getting every year.

Three years on, Rebecca describes it as one decision: “Best decision.”

What it changed commercially

The biggest change was not a technical one.

Connectivity stopped being a cost and became something the festival sells. Trade stand income matters to every county show and festival in the country, and traders talk to each other constantly about which shows are worth booking. A show where card payments work reliably, and where that is stated up front in the trade package, is a show traders come back to.

It changed who books, too. “I think it’s definitely made a difference. Previously, when we didn’t have WiFi, that was one of the biggest concerns.”

Being on site

Neither of them led with the kit when asked how it had gone.

That is the part that does not show up on a specification. A trader with a card machine that has stopped working does not want a support ticket on Monday. They want somebody walking down the row on Saturday afternoon.

Three years on

The network is not the same one we put in three years ago. Each year the site changes, the trading rows move, the crowd grows, and the design changes with it. That is what a repeat site should look like: the survey is already done, the site is understood, and the work each year is refinement rather than starting again.

What's next

Asked what comes next, Dawn said: “Bed. We usually have about a week to decompress and then we’re back into it. We’ve already had people wanting to sponsor for next year come to our tent.”

We will be back too.