Festival-goers used a whopping 25 terabytes of data via EE’s 4G network at Glastonbury
This year’s Glastonbury in Somerset, UK, can claim the title of the world’s most connected music festival. Mobile operator EE, the official tech and comms partner for the event, revealed that festival-goers used 25 terabytes of data over the five day event, which was 70% (10 terabytes) more than was predicted.
Up 130 % on last year’s data usage, this mind-blowing amount of data is equivalent to downloading Coldplay’s hit track Hymn For The Weekend six million times. Five terabytes of the data consumed was used for uploading content, the equivalent of sharing 22 million festival selfies.
EE installed the world’s largest and most powerful temporary 4G network on site with triple the capacity of 2015 to cope with the unprecedented demand. It saw activity peak during Friday morning’s referendum announcement and when Coldplay headlined the Pyramid stage.
Mat Sears, communications director at EE said: “We have seen data usage vastly increase at all major events year after year and knew that Glastonbury would be no exception. This is undoubtedly the biggest event in the UK music calendar and festival-goers want to share every epic moment. 25 terabytes is an extraordinary amount of data for our network to carry over five days – that‘s a lot of selfies – but by tripling capacity of our 4G network this year we were more than prepared.”
EE also provided phone charging services on site to keep people connected and created the official app as well as a technology first for the event: a Glastonbury Festival Virtual Reality experience.
This unique virtual reality content was filmed, edited and shown to revellers on site in the EE Recharge tent so they could virtually explore even more of Glastonbury’s vast site while waiting for their phones to charge. The VR video can now be viewed across EE social media channels.
The official Glastonbury app from EE also proved popular and was accessed over four million times during the festival as those on site dropped nearly 40,000 map location pins, favourited over three million acts and listened to nearly half a million Deezer clips of their favourite artists.
