A music festival isn't just a stage and speakers. Beneath every concert broadcast on television, every payment a festival-goer makes with their wristband, every live story an influencer posts, and every credential validated at the gates, there's an invisible network infrastructure that makes it all work. Enbex is the team that sets up that infrastructure at Coca-Cola Music Experience, one of the leading festivals in Spain. And what we do there goes far beyond «setting up WiFi.».
This article details everything involved in being the technical connectivity and broadcasting partner for a festival that gathers tens of thousands of people, is broadcast nationally on television via Divinity (Mediaset España), is simultaneously streamed on YouTube to millions of viewers, and operates entirely with cashless payment systems that rely on the network for every transaction. If the network goes down, the festival goes down. It's that simple.
The scope of the project: much more than public WiFi
When the Coca-Cola Music Experience organization contacts Enbex, the task isn't to install routers. It's to design, deploy, and operate the entire communications infrastructure for the venue. And when we say entire, we mean entire. The deployment simultaneously covers multiple service layers, each with its own performance, reliability, and security requirements.
On one hand, there's connectivity for the general public. Tens of thousands of people who want to upload photos, do Instagram live streams, send messages, and share their experiences on social media. This, which seems the most obvious, is actually one of the most complex challenges from an RF engineering standpoint, because it involves providing service to a huge mass of devices concentrated in a relatively small space.
But the public WiFi is just the tip of the iceberg. Beneath it are layers of critical service that, if they fail, bring the festival's operation to a grinding halt.
Cashless payments: every beer depends on the network
The Coca-Cola Music Experience, like most major festivals today, operates with a cashless payment system. Attendees do not pay with cash or card in the traditional sense. They pay with a tap of their RFID or NFC wristband against a terminal at each bar, each food stall, each merchandise point. That tap generates a transaction that needs to be validated against a backend server in real-time. And that validation travels over the network that Enbex deploys and operates.
The criticality of this network is difficult to overstate. If a payment terminal loses connectivity for 30 seconds, a queue forms. If it loses it for 5 minutes, a problem forms. If it loses it for half an hour, the festival has a serious operational and billing problem. We're talking about hundreds of point-of-sale terminals spread throughout the venue, all depending on the same network infrastructure to process thousands of transactions per hour.
Network sizing for a cashless system is not solely measured by bandwidth—an individual transaction consumes very few kilobytes—but by latency, reliability, and availability. Each terminal needs consistent server responses within milliseconds, regardless of whether 20,000 people are simultaneously uploading Instagram stories over the same infrastructure. This demands rigorous network segmentation with Quality of Service (QoS) policies that absolutely prioritize payment traffic over any other type of traffic.
Accreditations and Access Control
The festival gates are another point where the network is critical. Every press accreditation, every artist credential, every production pass, and every audience ticket is validated electronically. The gate readers need to communicate with the central accreditation system to verify the validity of each entry in real-time. A failure in gate connectivity not only causes endless queues; it creates security issues, because you can't verify who is entering and who isn't.
Enbex provides the network connections for all access control points at the venue, with redundancy and the necessary traffic prioritization to ensure access validation functions with the same reliability as the payment system.
Network for waiters, press, and production
Bar staff use connected devices to manage orders and process payments with the cashless system. Accredited press teams need high-speed connections to send reports, photos, and videos in real-time to their newsrooms. The festival's production team relies on the network for internal coordination, time management, and communication between different points on the grounds.
Each of these groups has distinct needs and, more importantly, none can share the general public's network limitations. A journalist trying to upload a video piece cannot compete for bandwidth with 15,000 smartphones simultaneously uploading TikToks. That is why the network is segmented into independent VLANs, each with its own capacity planning, its own priority policies, and its own performance guarantees.
Television Broadcast: From the Mobile Unit to Millions of Screens
This is where the project takes on a completely different dimension. The Coca-Cola Music Experience is broadcast live on Divinity, a Mediaset España channel. This means that, in addition to all the venue's network infrastructure, Enbex is responsible for encoding and transporting the signal from the mobile production unit to the network's broadcast center.
The broadcast van—usually operated by Mediaset—is the heart of television production. It's where the director has all camera feeds, where audio is mixed, where graphics are inserted, and where the final program signal is generated. This is the signal that millions of viewers see on their televisions when they tune into Divinity during the festival.
Enbex's work on this chain is critical: we encode the output signal from the mobile unit and transport it securely and reliably to the chain's injection point. For this, we use professional encoders that compress video in real-time, maintaining broadcast quality, with transport protocols designed to work over IP networks – including the internet – compensating for the inherent problems of these networks: packet loss, jitter, and latency fluctuations.
Television broadcasting encoding has extreme quality requirements. It's not just about «looking good.» It's about meeting the technical standards that Mediaset requires to put a signal on air on one of its channels. We're talking about resolution, bit rate, audio and video synchronization, and signal continuity without micro-cuts. A compression artifact that would go unnoticed in a YouTube stream is unacceptable in television broadcasting.
YouTube: millions of viewers in parallel
But traditional television is just one of the distribution channels. Simultaneously, the festival is broadcast on YouTube, where the audience is measured in millions of viewers. Streaming on YouTube has its own technical requirements: adaptive quality profiles, stability of the data stream to Google's CDN, and the need to maintain the signal for hours without interruption.
Enbex also manages these parallel codifications, generating independent streams optimized for each target platform. The signal going to television is not the same as the one going to YouTube: compression profiles, resolutions, and bitrates are adjusted for each distribution channel, maximizing quality within the constraints of each platform.
Influencers: Additional real-time broadcast channels
In recent editions, the festival has incorporated a dimension that adds complexity to its operation: collaboration with content creators and influencers who broadcast live from the venue to their own channels. It's not the same as an attendee doing a live broadcast from their phone with whatever coverage they might have, as it is for an influencer with hundreds of thousands or millions of followers to have a dedicated and guaranteed connection to broadcast with professional quality.
Enbex enables specific connections for these creators, with reserved bandwidth and the stability necessary for their broadcasts to avoid the fluctuations typical of the general public network. In some cases, this involves providing wired connection points or dedicated WiFi networks in the areas where influencers operate, with network configurations optimized for upload streaming.
This service layer may seem secondary, but it has a huge impact on the festival's media reach. An influencer with a million followers doing a smooth, good-quality live stream from backstage generates visibility that complements, and sometimes surpasses, that of conventional television broadcasts. Ensuring those streams work is a responsibility that falls directly on the infrastructure Enbex deploys.
Network Architecture: Segment to Prevent Failure
If there's one concept that defines the network architecture of a festival like Coca-Cola Music Experience, it's segmentation. You can't - and shouldn't - put all traffic on the same network. The consequences would be disastrous.
Let's imagine for a moment what would happen if cashless payment terminals, security cameras, press equipment, television signal encoding, influencer live streams, and the public's 20,000 smartphones all shared the same flat network, without segmentation or prioritization. A traffic spike from the public (e.g., when an artist comes on stage and thousands of people take photos and videos simultaneously) would be enough to saturate the network, causing payment terminals to stop responding, access readers to freeze, and the television signal to degrade.
This is why the network is designed with multiple, completely isolated VLANs. Each segment has its own network resources, its own quality of service policies, and in many cases, its own dedicated physical links. Broadcast television traffic is untouchable: it has the highest priority throughout its entire journey, from the mobile unit to the internet output. Payment and accreditation traffic comes immediately after. Press and VIP zone traffic has its own guarantees. And general public traffic occupies the remaining space, which is considerable but under no circumstances can it interfere with critical segments.
This architecture requires exhaustive planning before the event: how many VLANs, what IP ranges, what QoS policies on each switch and router, what firewall rules between segments, and what monitoring mechanisms to detect anomalies. All of this is designed, documented, and tested before the first attendee arrives.
Physical Deployment: Wiring a Temporary Enclosure
A music festival is not an office building with a ready-made network infrastructure. It's an exhibition center or an outdoor space that, weeks before the event, is an empty field or hall. All network infrastructure is set up from scratch and dismantled when it's over.
This involves laying miles of cable — fiber optic for high-speed backbones, Ethernet for distribution and access points — through temporary structures, stages, tents, food courts, and service areas. WiFi access points are installed on masts, stage structures, and temporary stands, at the heights and with the orientations calculated in the pre-coverage study.
The wiring for cashless payment terminals is particularly critical. Every bar, every food stall, and every point of sale needs a functional and tested network socket before the doors open. If a cable fails at a drinks bar that bills thousands of euros per hour, the economic impact is immediate and measurable.
Also, being a temporary environment, everything has to be robust against outdoor event conditions: heat, dust, sound vibrations, trip hazards, and the inevitable creativity of the setup crew who decides to run a flight case over your cable tray. Connections are protected, network equipment is placed in sheltered positions, and redundancies are installed at the most vulnerable points.
Live operation: the festival's NOC
When the doors open and the first attendees cross the access control, the deployment phase ends and the operation phase begins. And operating a network that simultaneously supports payments, access, television production, YouTube streaming, influencer live streams, and WiFi for tens of thousands of people requires a level of constant vigilance.
The Enbex team maintains a Network Operations Center (NOC) active for the entire duration of the festival. From this point, all systems are monitored in real-time: the status of each access point, traffic per network segment, payment system latency, video encoder status, signal quality sent to television, backbone link utilization, and dozens of additional metrics.
The reaction time must be immediate. If an AP goes down in the bar area, it needs to be detected and acted upon before the payment terminals that depend on that AP start failing. If the television signal shows degradation, the source of the problem must be identified — is it the encoder? Is it the network? Is it the output link? — and resolved in seconds, not minutes. Live broadcasts don't allow for «let's restart and see what happens.».
The NOC also manages the incidents that inevitably arise during any event of this magnitude. A stand that needs an additional connection that wasn't planned. A press team reporting speed issues. An influencer who has moved to an area of the venue where they don't have the coverage they need. Each of these situations is managed in real time, without interrupting the overall operation.
The pressure of live television
It's worth pausing to consider what it means to operate the encoding of a signal that's being broadcast live on a national television channel. This isn't a Twitch stream where, if there's a three-second interruption, the chat complains but nobody loses their job. This is a signal that Mediaset puts on the air through Divinity, where millions of people are watching the festival on their televisions.
If that signal is interrupted, the channel goes to black — or to a test card, which is almost worse —. That cannot happen. Period. The encoder has to be sending a continuous signal, with the required quality, for all the hours the broadcast lasts. And the output connectivity that transports that signal to Mediaset has to be just as reliable.
To ensure this, television broadcasting operates on infrastructure that is completely independent of the rest of the festival. Dedicated links, redundant equipment, and specific monitoring are used solely for this part of the system. If anything begins to show the slightest sign of degradation, there is an immediate action protocol that includes switching to backup equipment and routes.
Simultaneously, broadcasting on YouTube adds another layer of complexity. The stream needs to remain stable for hours for millions of concurrent viewers. Google has its own quality and signal stability requirements for content to be distributed correctly through its CDN. A micro-cut that can be resolved with a buffer in conventional television can cause YouTube to automatically degrade the stream's quality or even flag it as unstable, affecting its ranking and reach.
What the public never sees
The Coca-Cola Music Experience assistant arrives at the festival, validates their ticket with a wristband tap, buys a drink with another tap, uploads a photo to Instagram, watches their favorite influencer stream live from backstage, and upon arriving home, turns on Divinity to relive the best moments. At no point during this experience do they think about the network. And that's exactly the sign that everything is working.
Behind that invisible experience are weeks of planning, days of setup, miles of cable, hundreds of access points, professional encoding systems, redundant links, millimeter-precise network segmentation, and a technical team that doesn't sleep while the festival is running.
For Enbex, Coca-Cola Music Experience is one of those projects that synthesizes everything we know how to do: high-density connectivity, critical infrastructure for payments and access, production and encoding for television broadcasts, large-scale streaming, and live operation with no room for error. Everything converges in the same venue, at the same time, during the same weekend. And it has to work. Everything. The first time.
Deployment Specifications
Event: Coca-Cola Music Experience (CCME) — Madrid.
General public connectivity: High-density WiFi network for tens of thousands of simultaneous attendees.
Critical systems Dedicated and segmented network for cashless payments (RFID/NFC), accreditations, access control, waiters, and operations staff.
Press Dedicated high-speed connections for accredited media.
TV broadcast Broadcast signal encoding from a mobile production.
Digital streaming Signal encoding and transport for simultaneous broadcast on YouTube with an audience of millions of viewers.
Content creators Dedicated connectivity for influencers with live streams to their own channels.
Network architecture Multiple VLANs with full segmentation, differentiated QoS policies, redundant backbone, and dedicated links for critical traffic.
Operation: 24/7 Network Operations Center (NOC) active for the entire duration of the festival.
Result: Complete operation without service interruptions in payments, access, television broadcasting, and digital streaming.
Does your festival or event need a comprehensive solution for connectivity, payments, and ticketing? Contact Enbex and we build the infrastructure that makes it possible.