Connectivity for a contact free drive in cinema at Meridian Water, London
The situation
In the summer of 2020, with indoor venues shut, a drive in cinema opened on an open site at Meridian Water in north London. Films, live comedy and music, watched from the car, with the sound played through the car radio.
The whole venue was built to be contact free. Tickets were scanned through closed car windows. Food and drink were ordered from a phone and brought out to the car by attendants. Nobody queued, nobody handed anything over, and nothing was taken in cash.
A drive in has no building. An open site in a regeneration area has no connectivity. There was no incoming line, no comms room and nothing to plug into, and no sense in installing any of it for a venue built for a season.
They came to Fuse to find out whether the site could be made to work.
What was at stake
Because the venue was contact free, data was not supporting the operation, it was the operation. Entry depended on scanning. Trading depended on ordering. If the connection dropped, cars stopped moving through the gate and the venue stopped selling, with several hundred people sitting in a field waiting.
There was a commercial constraint on top of that. This was a temporary venue with an announced opening date. Nobody was funding permanent infrastructure for it, and a fixed line could not have been provisioned in the time available even if they had wanted one.
What Fuse did
- Assessed the site before specifying anything. The first question was whether the location could carry it at all. With no fixed infrastructure available and none worth installing for the run, mobile was the route, and the assessment established what the site could actually support.
- Put redundancy where an outage would have stopped trading. Four 4G routers were specified, all running unlimited data SIMs so a busy night could not run into an allowance. The critical positions were given dual SIM routers carrying two different networks with automatic failover between them, so a carrier problem became a switch rather than a queue of cars at a gate that could not scan them. The remaining positions ran single SIM units. Resilience was engineered where it was needed rather than spread evenly and paid for everywhere.
- Delivered it as a hire, not an installation. Fuse supplied, delivered, configured and supported the equipment for the duration, with remote maintenance and a support line behind it, then collected it at the end. No capital outlay, no commitment beyond the run, and nothing left to dispose of when the season finished.
The result
The venue opened on 4 July 2020 and traded as planned, on a site that had no connectivity of any kind before Fuse arrived and none afterwards.
Every car scanned at the gate and every order brought out to a vehicle ran across a connection that was specified, delivered, supported and recovered by Fuse.
The point
Temporary venues are the hardest connectivity problem there is. The site is usually somewhere nothing has been built, the run is too short to justify infrastructure, and the connection still has to behave as though it were permanent, because people have paid to be there on a particular night.
The answer is mobile, specified against the actual site rather than a coverage map, with unlimited data behind it and automatic failover at the points where an interruption would stop trading. Hired for the period, supported throughout, and taken away at the end.
It is the same capability Fuse was built on, putting working networks into film and television locations that had none. A field showing films to people in cars is a version of the same problem.
Check any UK commercial address free at connect.fusecore.co.uk.