Shows at London Fashion Week are Dressed with Peplink Connectivity

With only around 15 minutes each to make an impact, fashion shows at London Fashion Week rely heavily on the best tools and services to bring their vision to the runway. Similar to its counterparts in Milan, Paris, and New York, a large attendance is expected annually. And to reach a global audience, some shows are streamed online, while attendees also share content through online platforms. An event of this scale will require supercharged connectivity to deliver the necessary bandwidth.

Challenge

A Peplink partner was working with a leading London label and other brands to build a network infrastructure for the different shows. The main challenge was to provide ample bandwidth for a large number of guests and the production team to deliver live streams. The labels required high bandwidth capacity to cater to its high-resolution streams, one in HD and another in 4K.

Thanks to a generous budget, several connectivity options were considered. However, the show’s location was another hurdle. Since the main show was to be held at a park, there was limited infrastructure to install equipment. Additionally, with the shows soon approaching, short lead times were a must.

Solution

An EPX was first deployed in drop-in mode to seamlessly integrate with any existing infrastructure. A combination of 5G, SPF, and WAN modules were used, including a fiber internet connection for high-speed and reliable connectivity. By leveraging fiber internet, the network gains increased bandwidth capacity and reduced latency. Additionally, a Point-to-Point (PtP) connection was established between the EPX and a mast. The PtP connection facilitates efficient data transfer and network management.

A firewall, PfSense, was installed as a Virtual Machine on the EPX for traffic shaping. This ensures proper bandwidth is allocated for the streams and the network is not congested. Using Synergy Mode, 2 BR2 Pros and 4 HD1 Dome Pros were connected to the EPX to combine the number of WANs into a single device virtually. Up to 6 Starlink terminals were added to the solution to maximize the open space of the park.

Result

Several SpeedFusion tunnels were established, with Smoothing and TCP acceleration enabled to ensure reduced latency and high-definition streams of the fashion shows. This connectivity solution also allocated plenty of bandwidth to ensure guests were able to access online platforms to share about the shows. The London Fashion Week successfully hosted a live audience of up to 5000 individuals, while the streams were viewed by thousands more through supercharged connectivity delivered by Peplink.