Pound Ridge Harvest Festival Gets a Boost from WIFI Powered by Xpodigital
The Pound Ridge Harvest Festival is a highly anticipated, one-day Oktoberfest-style event held each year in the small, bucolic town of Pound Ridge, New York, only 55 miles from New York City. Each year, the festival takes over Pound Ridge Town Park and features an eclectic mix of live music, food and beverages, as well as a wide variety of activities and local vendors.
This year, the festival celebrated it’s 10th year and was host to several thousand area residents, even with rain showers passing by throughout the day. Taking center stage were two winning bands from the recent Pound Ridge Battle of the Bands competition and the Grammy award-winning rock band, Blues Traveler, which headlined the show.
Pound Ridge Harvest Festival Partners with Xpodigital
In advance of this year’s festival, Event Chairperson Kevin Long sought a solution to a problem that’s been frustrating festival attendees, vendors, and the event’s coordinators for a decade. “Pound Ridge Town Park lacks cellular coverage, and for the last ten years the annual event has operated without consistent WIFI service,” explained Long.
This year, the festival reached out to Xpodigital to enlist them for a limited pilot test that would determine the impact of WIFI access on the single-day event.
Xpodigital strategically placed 27 Wireless Access Points (WAPs) throughout Pound Ridge Town Park. This ensured maximum coverage and signal for event attendees, enabling seamless texting, WIFI-calling, and photo and video sharing across social media and online cloud-based services.
Xpodigital also created a private network to facilitate Point of Sale and essential communications for event support teams, ensuring immediate processing of transactions and coordination between volunteers and staff. WIFI bandwidth was provided through two primary Internet circuits while Starlink Satellite Internet Service was leveraged as an emergency backup. Finally, a team of Xpodigital engineers monitored the network throughout the day and made several adjustments to ensure continuous uptime and flawless performance.
At the height of the event, as Blues Traveler played on stage, over 747 devices were connected to the WIFI.
Impact of the Xpodigital Partnership
"The amount of planning, work, and effort that went into the Pound Ridge Harvest Festival from Xpodigital was spectacular,” said Kevin Long. “For the first time in our event history we had a private network with consistent WIFI service for point of sale and attendees using public WIFI.”
Seamless internet access from Xpodigital meant vendors could process electronic payments; attendees could share their experiences online; and everyone involved could receive real-time updates about the event and changing weather conditions.
The weather on the day of the event turned out to be rainy and overcast - not ideal for an outdoor event. But as Kevin Long explained, “The improved signal from Xpodigital helped the 2022 Pound Ridge Harvest Festival not become a rain-out. While not our highest year of attendance, still thousands showed up and sales were close to last year.”
“Social media posts from the event site were pivotal in communicating the ever-developing status of the festivities, which were somewhat impacted by the remnants of a storm stemming from Hurricane Ian. We were able to post videos, reels, and updates to Instagram, showing followers that the storm was clearing and the Harvest Festival was happening,” said Kevin Long.
In sum, the single-day event attended by a few thousand people went from scant online engagement in years past to generating 236 new social media followers, over 66 likes, 14 mentions, and 8 new positive online reviews.
Kevin Long concluded by stating, “This year, the overall experience improved substantially with the help of Xpodigital. We are truly grateful to them for donating their equipment, time and services to the Pound Ridge Harvest Festival and the Town of Pound Ridge.”
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