25th August 2023

Connecting Friends Music & Artists at Glastonbury

As official connectivity partner of Glastonbury for 2023, we were proud to keep all festival goers fully connected at this year’s event, and able to enjoy the best experience possible. We worked hard ensure our reliable, award winning network withstood the weekend’s demands, and at the end of it all, we’ve built an emotional, and hopefully long-lasting brand connection with our customers all over the world.

We love being such a core part of Glastonbury and supporting and enhancing such a memorable experience for so many people. Here’s more about what we did and how we did it, from two key members of our Vodafone Glastonbury team, Maria and Ker.

Maria Koutsoudakis

Brand & Marketing Director

We’re always looking to partner with events that give us an opportunity to show off the power of connection to help consumers feel closer, so Glastonbury is the perfect fit. There’s an undeniable love for Glastonbury amongst our customers and employees, and we made a lot of people very happy and proud by becoming a part of it!

My team works closely with the Network team to ensure we can deliver the best network experience possible for our sponsored events - we’d never sponsor something we couldn’t provide excellent connectivity on the ground for. Through our special events workstream, we work with them to prioritise the budget against key events our customers love and ensure we always deliver strong network capability. This workstream is managed through the monthly consumer network interlock, which keeps the full business aligned on the priority events.

For Glastonbury, we were also responsible for the recharge tent (charging stations and battery stations), and the event App, where the line-up, schedule, area map and news were found and allowed everyone to tailor their experience to their tastes. Long-term we’re aiming to bring in innovation enabled via 5G to elevate the experience even further. It’s been amazing being involved in something that’s had such an impact on our core business metrics and employee pride - I’m looking forward to the next one!

Ker Anderson

Head of Detailed Planning & Optimisation

Glastonbury is a hugely important event in the Vodafone calendar and always an engineering challenge. My team’s been involved from the very beginning - we were a core part of the original pitch, this allowed us to start planning much earlier than normal and ensured we had a solution to demonstrate our capability and commitment.

Our objective is simple: to provide an amazing, highly reliable, fast and efficient network experience. We used all technologies from 2G to 5G this year to ensure the best possible connectivity. We want customers to be able to use their devices wherever and whenever they need to, whether that’s in front of the pyramid stage or late at night in the campsites.

The key challenges are: getting the balance between adding more capacity but being able to control interference between cell sites; getting the ideal locations for temporary cell sites (we don’t have freedom to locate where we want to as the venue has to host other operators and facilities); building in resilience so we don’t lose all cell sites if one link fails; and getting enough capacity into the really busy areas.

Most temporary cell sites are very non-standard so require a lot of work to ensure we deliver the optimum performance. We have been developing the capability on our temporary masts for a long time, and we use some very specialist antennas which can concentrate huge amounts of capacity into a small area.

Above all, we wanted to be sensitive to the things that mattered to Glastonbury and ensure that our agenda and plans would dovetail into their own vision for this world-famous event. I feel we managed to achieve that and I’m really proud of what our teams achieved and to play a part in something that’s such a special life event for people - I believe that life really is all about experiences!