A live streamed event in Glasgow, carried on mobile, with three networks behind it
The situation
Scottish Water was broadcasting a live streamed event to an audience of employees and management, covering company news and business change. The production was being run by MCL Create, who came to Fuse for the connectivity.
A live stream has no second attempt. It either goes out or it does not, and everyone watching finds out at the same moment. There is no pause, no rescheduling, and no way to recover a broadcast that drops halfway through.
What was at stake
Everything the event was for depended on a connection holding for its duration. A drop would not have been a technical inconvenience, it would have been the event itself failing, in front of the entire organisation, with the production team and the client carrying that in the room.
The connection also had to come from mobile. That means live dependence on networks nobody on site controls.
What Fuse did
- Spread the risk across three networks, not one. Two multi network routers, each carrying two 4G SIMs drawn from three different carriers. No single network, and no single router, could take the broadcast off air on its own.
- Tested on site the day before and chose the primary on evidence. All three networks were measured in position the day before the event. They all performed, and the strongest was set as the primary. The decision about which network to lead on was made from measurements taken in that building, not from a coverage map.
- Configured automatic failover and stayed to watch it. The routers were set to switch carrier automatically, without anyone intervening, so a network problem became a switch rather than an incident. Fuse monitored the connection live throughout the broadcast.
The result
On the day of the event, one of the networks developed a problem.
The routers switched automatically to the other two. The connection stayed stable, the broadcast continued, and the event ran to its conclusion. The failover was the difference between a problem and a disaster, and it happened without anyone watching the stream being aware there had been either.
The point
Most connectivity is sold on how fast it is. What actually matters, on the day something is riding on it, is what happens when part of it stops working.
Redundancy is the kind of thing that looks like an unnecessary cost right up until the moment it is the only reason the event went out. On this job it was used, in live conditions, and it did exactly what it was there to do.
That principle has not changed. It is why Fuse puts a second connection behind the first in buildings as well as at events, so a business stays working when one part of it does not.
Check any UK commercial address free at connect.fusecore.co.uk.