TourTech Builds High Performance Networks a Few Days at a Time

Miles of fiber. Dozens of vendors. Temporary, critical networks serving hundreds of thousands of event attendees... set up in days.

How do they do it?

Their story is nothing short of amazing. TourTech is a company of under 50 employees that scales massive, temporary networks, takes them down, then builds them again miles away in another location. Up-time and performance are critical. Seconds matter.

They have a noble mission: to detect and fix problems before users and partners can even detect them. That’s what they do.

It’s part of who they are as a company and a key driver to their success in winning and maintaining long term, large event contracts:

“Because our networks are temporary, our goal is to diagnose problems before our customers even detect them. We want them solved ASAP.” - Travis Banks, Director of Technical Operations, TourTech

For Lollapalooza they lay about 5.5 miles of redundant fiber in a park for four days. About 400k people will attend the event and a few dozen sponsors will do everything from selling merch, to offering virtual reality games or even live streaming a top gamer to hundreds of thousands of fans around the world. They’ve been running the event network for years.

How do they stay on top of performance issues in complex, temporary networks? 

They think differently about how they monitor their networks. They cannot afford to wait for users to report problems so they get ahead of them. They can detect issues before users (and even carriers) can.

Traditional Network Monitoring Tools Weren’t Enough

Because up-time is critical to event success, the TourTech team needs robust, real-time network visibility for rapid root cause analysis. Traditional approaches to network monitoring wouldn’t give them the insight they need when they need it. They manage 15-20 large-scale events with hundreds of thousands of attendees (like Lollapalooza) every year, in addition to more than a hundred smaller venues.

In many ways these short-term event networks are as complex as networks serving larger organizations and managed by larger teams. A typical major event can have 20-30 different vendors/sponsors using a variety of different applications, ranging from RFID to ticketing, streaming, point-of-sale and immersive brand experiences. 

They’re On It - Even When it's Not the Network

Often the most frequent problems faced in these demanding environments has little to do with the network. By deploying a dispersed assortment of NetBeez sensors geographically, the team can reduce time to diagnose/fix, even when it’s not the network.

They get deeper insight, faster than other approaches. And according to Travis, the most frequent challenges faced during these hyper events are unresponsive servers (cloud-based and onsite)and 3rd or 4th party ISP routing issues. Other network monitoring approaches could leave them guessing.

“We’ll see high latency times or rejected pings from a cloud or onsite server and warn clients that there is a chance they’ll start having problems…” - Travis Banks

They Chose NetBeez Because Seconds Matter

When network performance and up-time matters, NetBeez stands out. It delivers real-time user experience insight from multiple locations. Root causes can be identified quickly, sometimes before users and carriers even notice them. So TourTech din't take any shortcuts with network monitoring tools. Up-time, performance and safety are their core business.

The key NetBeez capabilities that allow TourTech to maintain temporary, high performance networks:

Note: Since this interview many large events have been cancelled because of COVID-19 infection risks. 

Given the scale challenges facing cities, hospitals and other critical services, maybe someone reading this would refer (share this) TourTech and its unique, specialized expertise for scaling temporary, highly available network services? Contact me and I’ll introduce you.