Vodafone uses network slicing to support drinks service at Glastonbury

Vodafone dedicated a small portion of its network at the 2024 Glastonbury Festival to connect 102 of EBC's payment machines, using a technique known as network slicing.

Vodafone partnered with one of Glastonbury Festival’s onsite drinks vendors to trial network slicing technology to speed up card transactions, allowing Festivalgoers to spend more time at the stages.

This years’ Festival brought together 200,000 attendees, with more than 100 stages and almost 1,000 trading stalls, generating 225 TB of data across Vodafone’s network – a year-on-year increase of 33%.
Network slicing allowed Vodafone to reserve a small portion of the network to one of the Festival bar operators to increase reliability of payment machines on three of their ten sites.

Vodafone has successfully completed a network slicing  demonstration, offering a dedicated slice of connectivity to EBC, one of the biggest vendors of beverages at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, ensuring business operations ran smoothly alongside record data usage.

Building a telecommunications network for over 200,000 people is a complex task at the best of times, but the challenge is compounded for the Glastonbury Festival. For five days a year, the site of Glastonbury Festival becomes the fourth largest population centre in the South West, before quickly returning to picturesque grazing grounds for cattle.

Vodafone breaks network data records at Glastonbury Festival yet again
225 terabytes of data was consumed by data hungry Festival-goers.
To ensure customers can stay connected and share experiences with loved ones, Vodafone constructs a temporary telecoms network in the space of three weeks. This year, the network not only connected festivalgoers, but also EBC to ensure customer electronic payments were able to be processed without delay.

Cutting processing times and speeding-up service
As part of the demonstration at Glastonbury Festival, Vodafone dedicated a small portion of the network to connect the EBC payment machines, through a technique known as network slicing.

EBC manage 10 onsite bars across the Festival, each of which has multiple card machines. The demonstration connected three sites via a slice, which in total served 102 tills. During peak times, each till processed two transactions a minute.

Network slicing is a 5G Standalone capability which allows Vodafone to create different virtual networks on the same physical infrastructure. Known as slices, each one is dedicated to a particular service, in this case providing connectivity to the EBC payment machines, ensuring its performance is not impacted by other users’ demands on the network. Crucially, the performance capabilities of each slice can be customised to the use cases that it connects.

Nick Gliddon, Business Director, Vodafone UK, said: “The future of digital technology is designed to connect anything and everything – it is so much more than a network for our smartphones and will impact every facet of our lives.”

The slice was optimised to support the maximum number of concurrent transactions during peak busy periods and was protected from network congestion. The result was that payment machines were not impacted by general data usage, meaning customers were served faster, so they could spend more time enjoying the festival rather than standing in queues.

Real-time connectivity is crucial to authorising card payments. Without real-time authentication of payments, it is estimated that 4% of revenues can be lost to fraudulent transactions.

Ryan Kingsley, Stock Manager, EBC, said: “Running some of the busiest bars at Glastonbury, it is so crucial that we have a stable data connection with the capacity to operate our tills. The Vodafone slice ensured that the three bars supported in the demonstration had that stable data connection and helped us serve our customers faster than ever before!”