Out standing in a field

Mythic Beasts: out standing in a field

Last year the Cambridge Beer Festival tried accepting payments by contactless cards. This didn’t work very well. They built a wireless LAN around the bar so that their card payment machines could process transactions. This went to an uplink that was a Raspberry Pi with a 4G dongle attached, this wasn’t really reliable enough for a full payment system, but worked as a proof of concept.

To improve things for this year we had a conversation with some friends at the recently incorporated Light Blue Fibre Ltd and between us were able to arrange for Jesus Green to have a fibre and an interlink to Mythic Beasts. As this is a prototype, we’re running below optimum speeds so we’ve delivered a relatively leisurely 1Gbps to the festival. The access points will happily deliver 150Mbps symmetric at any point on the bar if you have a quick enough wifi card in your laptop. We’ve still got the 3G uplink enabled as a backup just in-case someone slices the fibre.

If my phone had an Ethernet socket we’d be ten times as fast.

This year the plan was to restrict things to the tills and the administration network. However, being techies in a beer festival there is a tiny chance we may have been slightly drunk and enabled public wifi with a 100Mbps rate limit. This works well around the bar but there’s nowhere near enough access points to cover the outdoors and the onsite router is limited to 500 devices. It’s not yet production ready for 5,000 beer-drinking visitors, but we have a beer mat and a pencil and we’re sketching out ideas for next year.