Why you lose mobile signal at festivals and stadiums
Feb 28th 2026
Dense crowds, heavy broadcast feeds, physical obstacles and temporary setups often exceed local network capacity, leaving fans unable to call, pay or stream; 5G will help but deployment is slow.
- Crowds create concentrated, simultaneous demand that often exceeds local mobile and Wi-Fi capacity.
- Broadcast and media feeds consume huge dedicated bandwidth, with each live camera needing around 1.5 Gbps on major events.
- Modern stadiums use fibre backhaul, distributed antenna systems and high-capacity Wi-Fi to support tens of thousands of connections.
- Steel, concrete and sudden demand spikes like halftime or peak set times make reliable coverage technically hard even with infrastructure in place.
- Temporary events must build fragile network gear weeks before the event, which is harder to provision and more failure prone than permanent systems.
- 5G and 5G standalone can increase capacity but rollout and extra antenna installations are slowed by planning and local objections.