"The venue has Wi-Fi, so streaming should be fine, right?" is the question we hear most on site surveys — and the answer is almost always no. Here are the numbers we actually run, so you know what to ask for before booking a venue or negotiating the network.
When a hotel or convention center says "100M fiber", that usually means downlink. Streaming uses uplink — which may be only 20M, shared across the whole building. Here are the encoding bitrates per quality level, and the uplink we recommend reserving.
Why double the encoding bitrate? Because stream traffic isn't a flat line: scene cuts, subtitle animations and noisy audience shots all cause momentary spikes, while backup streams and director monitoring share the same pipe. And if you simulcast to YouTube and Facebook, the uplink requirements simply add up.
"There's internet" doesn't mean "you can stream". Public networks at convention centers and hotels are shared building-wide — when your press conference starts, the event next door is on the same line. So our rule is simple: the stream never rides public Wi-Fi.
Uplink and downlink are asymmetric. Always measure uplink during the site survey, and measure at the same time of day as your event — 50M at 10 a.m. can drop to 8M by 2 p.m. The venue isn't lying to you; there are just more people on the line.
Firewalls block streaming. Corporate and campus networks often block the ports streaming relies on. More than once we've had everything rigged and the signal wouldn't leave the building — the backup line saved the day. Checking with the venue's IT staff beforehand is far cheaper than fixing it on site.
Dedicated lines for important streams. We apply for an event-only line from the telecom carrier: exclusive bandwidth, physically isolated from the venue network. Lines need lead time, so file as soon as the date is set — one more reason we recommend surveying early.
4G/5G failover is always on. However stable the main line is, the backup stays live. When a switch is needed it happens in seconds — viewers see a brief dip in quality at most, never a dropped stream.
Reserve bandwidth for the invisible loads. Director return feeds, remote speakers' video calls and live captioning all compete for the same line. Bandwidth planning covers the whole load, not just the push stream.
Tell us the venue and what the event needs — network assessment and dedicated-line applications are part of our Network Engineering service.
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