When 500,000 people gather in one place, everyone wants the same thing: to capture a good shot, share the perfect story, and have internet that won’t ‘break’. This was the topic of discussion at the new Sofascore Stadium Meetup titled Signal for Half a Million People.
The reason for the meetup was a unique infrastructural challenge: how to ensure a stable signal and internet for half a million people gathered in one place. This test took place this July at the Zagreb Hippodrome when Marko Perković Thompson held the largest concert ever in this region. While attendees enjoyed and sang, a complex operation was underway behind the scenes where all domestic telecoms worked together to build a network strong enough to support several hundred thousand parallel connections.
On the panel, experiences were shared by Goran Toplek, Director of the Access Network Development Department at Hrvatski Telekom, Jadranko Dundović from the coordination and supervision of IT infrastructure at the concert, and Mirko Gudelj, the concert organizer.
– We did not start with the knowledge that half a million people would come. The announcements were more modest, and then the reality check began. Either our team would pull it off, or no one would. We set up 37 new base stations at 11 locations, and over mobile networks, a total of 90 terabytes of traffic passed through. Only on Instagram, 20 percent of that traffic was directed, and 18 percent on WhatsApp. The number of calls was 120 percent higher than usual – said Toplek.
For the concert organizer, the security aspect was crucial.
– The risk was enormous. Not financially, but in terms of safety – if someone cannot buy water or communicate. That’s why we had backup backups and several parallel options. Over 700 people and more than 100 companies worked on the project, from software and hardware to scaffolding and cranes. Everything had to be coordinated – said Gudelj.
