As the Swedish rock band Europe sang… It's the final countdown! The Zwarte Cross 2024 festival is coming up loud, fast, and connected more than ever. This July, Extreme Networks and partners will once band together to add high-octane fuel powering unforgettable wireless experiences!
What is it: the biggest music party in the Netherlands, the largest outdoor motor event in the world, and it’s all connected by a super-fast wired & wireless network from Extreme?
For almost 30 years, Zwarte Cross has entertained guests from around the world with a truly unique mix of music artists, motocross stunts, sports, theater acts, and sheer fun. The iconic event is coming back to Achterhoek, the eastern region of the Netherlands, to once again celebrate the spirit of fun, love and camaraderie. The amazing lineup led by the legendary DJ Armin van Buuren and a number of other top Dutch artists performing timeless hits by ABBA, Phil Collins, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and others, will make it one to remember!
But behind every festival, big or small, there is a lot of thinking, planning and organizing, and we’ve already began our preparations! As in previous years, the Extreme Networks Benelux team will connect on site with our partners from Indicium B.V. and Palo Alto, to deliver a truly stellar performance… Not just on stage, but throughout the entire festival grounds – with a top-notch wireless connectivity that enables seamless social media sharing, instant updates, and personalized content, igniting emotions while creating an overall immersive experience!
The technology behind the emotions
At Zwarte Cross, the adrenaline is pumping fast, and so must the transfer of data. To grant the festivalgoers the much needed, high-performing connectivity to bandwidth-hungry applications and services, for the first time in the festival’s history its wireless network will feature next-generation Wi-Fi 7 solutions. The AP5020 access point, introduced earlier this year, will provide high-efficiency, high-performance 802.11be aggregate data rates of up to 20 Gbps in the 6 GHz, 5 GHz, and 2.4 GHz bands. This will be complemented by Extreme’s AP460C – high-performance Wi-Fi 6 access points designed for the most challenging, high-density outdoor applications. These models will combine top notch performance and advanced security capabilities into an enterprise-class solution that will allow the Indicium B.V. team to deploy a high-speed, highly secure network into one of the toughest environments out there, and manage it easily via the ExtremeCloud IQ platform.
After the successful pilot of the OpenRoaming technology last year, attendees of the upcoming edition of Zwarte Cross once again will be able to connect seamlessly to the festival’s secure Wi-Fi network, without having to enter any username or password. OpenRoaming uses the latest and greatest in the encryption technology to protect user data and does not require guests to go through a painfully cumbersome, multi-step process of activating profiles on their devices. Switching from the cellular network to a high-speed, secure Wi-Fi becomes as easy as one-two-three!
Last but not least – to help the operational teams on site to support key operations and securely connect all the staff devices and IoT equipment, festival’s wired network infrastructure will be based on Extreme Fabric Connect. This scalable solution will not only automate many manual processes, allowing to deploy services and applications much easier, faster and error-free – it will also dramatically improve their security by introducing the hyper-segmentation functionality and working in tandem with the next-generation firewalls from Palo Alto Networks.