Playtopia 2024

Event WiFi Case Study

Cape Town’s premier indie gaming and immersive arts festival.

Background

Founded in 2018, Playtopia is Africa’s first annual destination Indie Games & Immersive Arts festival and conference. The event is organised and run by the team at Free Lives, an indie game dev studio based in Cape Town.

The Playtopia event was held in Cape Town’s historically significant Homecoming Centre on Caledon Street, and needed WiFi for the event. Some of the Free Lives team use Atomic for their fibre service, so they naturally reached out to us to discuss providing Fibre Internet and WiFi for the event.

Requirements

• The event attracts 750-1000 attendees over 2 days
• Internet connectivity for a high-density environment
• Setup ~30 PCs before the event
• WiFi during the event for the PCs running games in the arcade
• Separate Guest WiFi during the event

Fibre line vendor choice

The fibre choices we had were between Octotel and Cybersmart Open Access and we went with an Octotel business fibre line because there was already a conduit from the Fibre Wall Box to very close proximity to where we needed to install the network equipment.

Prior to the event we felt 300 Mbps would cater for a maximum of 400 people that could occupy the event space at one time, so we deployed a 300/300 Octotel Business fibre line.

LAN and WiFi vendor choice

We assessed 2 vendors we frequently deploy, and ended up choosing UniFi for this deployment. Why we didn’t go with Reyee:

• Reyee Cloud Gateways have an upper limit of connected clients, meaning one extra client above the limit would disconnect another client. The jump in maximum connected clients of their Cloud Gateways goes from 100, 300 then to 1500 for their flagship RG-EG1510XS. 
• At the time we couldn’t get WiFi 7 APs from Reyee.

We decided to go with UniFi because we have a certified Ubiquiti Wireless Administrator on the team and the UDM pro with WiFi 7 Pro APs gave us enough overhead to cater for the high density environment with many connected client devices. We should note that UniFi does not have a way to load balance clients to APs, but the APs can band steer from 2.4GHz to 5GHz.

The hardware deployment was:

• 1 x Dream Machine Pro (UDM-PRO)
• 4 x POE+ Injectors
• 4 x UniFi U7 Pro
• ~150m of shielded CAT 6 cable
• Cable ties

The installation

We had to be exceptionally sensitive to the building because the Homecoming Centre’s heritage status, so we could only use non-permanent and non-damaging attachments for the cabling and WiFi APs.  We also needed to break down the equipment shortly after the event, and we wanted this to be a quick part of the project.

There were some existing holes to run cables between rooms, and existing cable trays, and metal conduits. So we used a combination of shielded CAT6 cable to avoid interference from any electric cables, and use cable ties to mount the APs.

The network setup

Ubiquiti UniFi made the process of setting up the network very rapid. We set up:

• 1 x LAN and WiFi for Staff and the connected Arcade machines
• 1 x LAN and WiFi with guest privileges with client isolation for attendees
• For WiFi we set all APs to broadcast:
  • 2.4GHz WiFi at medium transmit power at 40Mhz channel bandwidth
  • 5GHz WiFi at medium transmit power at 160Mhz channel bandwidth
  • 6GHz WiFi at medium transmit power at 320Mhz channel bandwidth
  • Set a suitable minimum RSSI to avoid devices that left the event space from using excessive airtime and creating connection retries

Stats and Results

Top Line stats

• Total unique WiFi clients 378 (over 2 days)
  • WiFi 4: 114
  • WiFi 5: 117
  • WiFi 6: 130
  • WiFi 7: 6 (iPhone16, Samsung S24s)
• Traffic usage:
  • 295GB over 2 day event
  • iCloud: 8.6%
  • Windows updates: 8.4%
  • Facebook: 8.4%
  • Instagram: 4%
• Installation: ~8 hours
• Break down: ~2 hours

It was surprising to see such a large number of devices connecting with the much older WiFi 4 standard. Additionally, iCloud emerged as the largest platform in terms of bandwidth usage—likely due to the sheer volume of photos being taken and uploaded to the cloud.

Final thoughts

Overall, Playtopia 2024 was a well-organized event, offering a truly unique blend of gaming and interactive art experiences. While the venue presented some initial challenges for the installation, the process went smoothly, and we ensured no trace of our setup remained afterwards.

The Business Fibre Internet and WiFi performed flawlessly throughout the event, with zero complaints. The captive portal worked seamlessly, and the inclusion of 6GHz and WiFi 7 technologies elevated the experience, showcasing the cutting-edge capabilities of our network design.

In hindsight, our network setup may have been over-engineered, but it ensured exceptional performance and reliability.

We look forward to seeing Playtopia thrive in the years to come and are excited to support similar local events in the future.

Talk to us about Business Fibre services and Enterprise Wifi solutions.