Call-heavy Monday, video-rich Sunday
The data traffic during the Festival is equivalent to that of nearly 35 average base stations in Budapest, and the combined traffic of the Festival’s base stations comes up to 25 times the traffic of an average weekday in Budapest. Compared to the data recorded on Óbudai Island during an average summer period (3-8 July this year), Yettel’s network had around 200 times more calls and 1,200 times more data usage during the six days of the Festival.
In terms of voice calls, the final day (Monday, 12 August) was the busiest, with visitors making around 15 percent more calls than the average daily traffic during the Festival. The mobile operator’s report identifies two peak days in terms of data usage. On Saturday and Sunday, data usage was around 14 to 15 percent higher than on an average Sziget day, while the closing day was around 11 percent above the average.
The Sziget Festival attracts a large number of foreign visitors every year. Thanks to Yettel’s international partners, visitors can also benefit from increased capacity. VoLTE roaming, i.e. voice traffic routed over high-capacity 4G, is now available in 28 countries – and to foreign subscribers visiting from the same number of countries allowing the network to handle significantly more concurrent calls.
The largest groups of Sziget visitors are usually from the Netherlands and the UK which is also reflected in mobile traffic data. This year, the largest number of foreign visitors to Sziget – i.e. those who made calls or used the mobile network – came from the UK, with slightly (2-3%) fewer users from the Netherlands. Austria is in third place.
Official telecom partner Yettel prepared to serve the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the event with a boost in network capacity equivalent to that of a small town. The mobile network, reinforced by six additional base stations and 5G, performed well during the nearly week-long test. It responded well to the sudden increase in traffic, ensuring that tens of thousands of festival-goers in a relatively small area were able to make calls and surf the web without any problems at the same time.