In-person Event Internet Bandwidth Considerations

When planning an in-person event, one of the options you may be negotiating with the company providing the event space is around how much wireless bandwidth to provide to your guests.  Short of the ideal answer of "as fast as possible", there are many considerations to figure out what might be an optional internet speed under which the performance of the software may start to suffer.  

There are typically 2 typical consumers of the internet connection at a venue:

1) Your volunteer & staff using the BetterUnite application to authorize cards and check-in guests 

In this use case, the application does not consume much bandwidth. It will mainly use the internet connection to search for a guest, update card details to authorize a card, and update a guest record. These are not "data-intensive" activities and do not require a high bandwidth.  Also these activities are typically limited to a period of time when the guests are arriving and checking in, and an event will typically enlist 2-8 volunteers for check-in services, so the demand for the internet services are limited, hence the load on the wireless connection is not much.

2) Guests who may be allowed to connect to the venue wireless connection for internet needs

In most cases, guests on their phones will typically use their own internet connection since either the venue wireless is not free or the guests do not actively connect to wireless unless necessary.  

If however, you are in a remote event, and you expect all guests to connect to the wireless connection at the venue, and they will be using their "guest experience" page to interact with your event or auction, then there are multiple considerations to review:

a) How many guests will be connecting simultaneously?

Simultaneous demand for internet service and how much data each request consumes may have a big impact on the wireless speed. While not all guests will be on their guest page at the same time, you can make assumptions that throughout the event a certain % (10-20%) will be using their page to interact with the event at the same time. This depends on the type of event you are running and what your guests are expected to do during the event. For example, at the time of a call-to-action that is guiding guests to their guest page, this number of simultaneous guests accessing the guest page could reach 90% or more, in which case, the number of guests become a large factor in wireless bandwidth requirements. You will also need to consider what they are accessing before you can determine how much bandwidth to request. See bullets below for more considerations.

b) What type of fundraising activities will the guests participate in?

If you are doing a silent or live auction, and you ask the guests to participate in a fast-bidding cycle or if you are asking guests to purchase particular event items, all at the same time, then you would be guiding all guests to their guest experience and to the exact location to request the same data at the same time over the internet.  While BetterUnite servers are equipped to service thousands of requests at the same time, your local internet connection will still be experiencing all guests demanding internet data simultaneously which can make it a potential bottleneck.  Again, depending on the options being served to the guests on their guest page, there are more considerations below.

c) How many fundraising options are you providing in your guest experience

Let's assume the above bullet points are maximized, and in an event with large number of guests you also have periods where you are asking all guests to access their guest page to participate in a particular fundraising activity.  For example, call-to-bid on an auction item.  You can consider that every guest will access their guest page, which will automatically download and show the auction items on their guest page.  In a typical guest page, you may assume around 5-10Kb of data being transferred for each item (auction item, items for sale, giving level) assuming the item has an image associated with it.  If you have 100 items in a list (e.g. auction items), then you will have each person requesting roughly  5*100=500Kb to 1Mb of data every time they access their page.  If you have 100 people doing this at the same time, your wireless connection needs to be able to handle 100Mb of data quickly.  Obviously if you had 500 people doing this, you'd need to be able to serve 500Mb of data simultaneously quickly.

These are rough estimates based on generalized data sizes. When guests click on an item, they get to view the images and videos associated with the items. Images are typically going to be 100Kb each, so depending on how many guests you're expecting to view each item at the same time, you may be considering a little more than the above scenario as well.

Need Additional Help?

We're here to assist you in any way we can. Don't hesitate to reach out to support@betterunite.com

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