How Vodafone supported summer 2024's most iconic UK events

Sunset during Boardmasters Festival in Cornwall.

While the weather may not have always cooperated this summer, network connections at some of the UK’s biggest events were a lot more reliable thanks to The Nation’s Network.

Between May and August 2024, Vodafone helped serve up fast and reliable data connections at 54 events up and down the UK, to the tune of more than 1037 terabytes (TB) of data traffic being carried on the Vodafone network.

Kicking off the festival season in style was Mighty Hoopla, where Vodafone hosted a Connect & Charge tent, providing free phone charging and WiFi to festivalgoers in London’s Brockwell Park.

Next on the calendar was a visit to Wales from one of this year’s biggest stars, as Taylor Swift touched down at Principality Stadium to wow 70,000 ‘Swifties’. Her fans responded in style, by breaking the record for the most data ever used at the venue.

A huge 3.3 TB of data was consumed during the show, beating the previous 1.3 TB record held by Pink. Even at this increased capacity, Vodafone’s reliable network ensured fans could share photos or live stream the iconic event.

Towards the end of June, attention quickly turned to two of the UK’s biggest and most-loved events: Wimbledon and Glastonbury.

The UK’s premiere tennis tournament saw Vodafone launch its ‘Connect Better’ challenge, pledging to donate up to 75,000 connections in line with the fastest serves witnessed across the fortnight.

The challenge was part of the everyone.connected programme, which has already helped more than 2 million people and businesses to cross the digital divide.

Meanwhile, over in Somerset, Vodafone once again supported the UK’s biggest festival as Glastonbury’s Official Connectivity Partner. With the official app downloaded 226,215 times, Vodafone helped festivalgoers use a record-breaking 225 TB of data – 33.14% more than 2023’s edition.

This was helped by a free eSIM network trial, which allowed attendees to pick up 50GB of data for seven days, completely free of charge. In total, almost 15,000 people ordered an eSIM during the festival.

A similar trial took place at both Boardmasters Festival in Newquay, Cornwall, and Kendall Calling, wrapping up the festival season for another year. Here, as was the case at many of these events, mobile signal was bolstered by the presence of various Cells on Wheels – or COWs for short.

These temporary mobile masts, which can be moved depending on connectivity needs and demands, travelled a total of 7,451 miles to attend 54 events between May and August 2024. This helped Vodafone to bring its reliable network to fans and festivalgoers across the UK this summer.

In fact, at 20 of the 22 events at which Vodafone benchmarked since the beginning of its special event season, where competitors were present, the company ranked as the number one network. These events included The Grand National, the London Marathon, British Open Golf and All Points east, among others.

What’s even more striking about these figures, however, is that this summer marks the first without 3G for Vodafone, following the completion its 3G switch off in February 2024.

Instead, voice and data are both now solely carried on 4G and 5G, delivering much better user experience for customers in the form of faster data services and clearer voice calls. As a result, Vodafone witnessed an average of 89.26% Voice over Long-Term Evolution (VoLTE) traffic between the May-August period.

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