When the cell towers give up,
your festival keeps talking.
Music festivals and raves cover hundreds of acres. The moment tens of thousands of phones pull at once, cell service collapses. Loxation runs phone-to-phone over Bluetooth mesh — and our new Loxation Mesh Routers extend that mesh across the entire venue. Attendees find their crew. Organizers reach the crowd. End-to-end encrypted. Independent of the carriers.
The cell network was never built for this.
A field of 40,000 people behaves nothing like a Tuesday afternoon downtown. Carriers know it — they roll in COWs (cells on wheels) for major events and the towers still saturate. Texts queue. Calls fail. The "post a story to Instagram" reflex pushes the network past breaking point. Your attendees lose each other. Your ops team loses the crowd.
Cell saturation is structural
It's not a bug — it's load. Every additional COW helps a little, none of them solve density at festival scale. The crowd wins, every time.
The lost-friend tax
Attendees report that "finding my crew" is the most stressful part of a multi-day festival. Bluetooth proximity + a mesh-routed group chat removes that stress entirely.
Ops blind spots are dangerous
Weather rolls in. A set time changes. Someone needs medical at the back of the field. If the comms layer to the crowd is down, you're flying blind.
How the system works.
Three layers: phones, BLE mesh between phones, and Loxation Mesh Routers that stitch BLE pockets together over a private WiFi backbone. The whole thing runs without any carrier or public internet.
1. Phones (the leaves)
Attendees install Loxation. The app discovers nearby phones over Bluetooth LE — no GPS, no carrier required. Messages and presence flow phone-to-phone.
2. BLE mesh (peer-to-peer)
Phones relay each other's traffic. In a tight crowd this works fine on its own. Across a 200-acre site, the mesh fragments into pockets — that's where the routers come in.
3. Mesh Routers (the backbone)
Loxation Mesh Routers form a WiFi mesh among themselves and bridge BLE pockets. The mesh now spans the whole venue. Phones never need to associate with the routers — they keep talking BLE.
One system, two sides.
Loxation works for the people in the crowd and the people running the show. Same app, same mesh, different surfaces.
For attendees
- Find your crew. See who from your group is on-site, even when nobody has bars.
- Group chat that works. Mesh-routed, end-to-end encrypted, low-latency.
- Festival-wide announcements. Set times, weather, last-call shuttles — pushed to every phone on the mesh.
- Lost-and-found. Post and search venue-wide without internet.
- Privacy by default. No phone numbers exchanged. Identifiers rotate. Leave the site, leave the mesh.
For organizers & venues
- Reach every attendee. Push announcements to the entire crowd, independent of the carriers.
- Site-wide coverage. Routers are placed during load-in to cover stages, camps, parking, and ops.
- Dedicated medical & security channels. Private broadcast lanes for ops teams.
- Real-time visibility. Coarse, anonymized presence data — see crowd density across the site.
- Plug-and-play deployment. Loxation handles design, install, on-site support, and tear-down.
The Loxation Mesh Router.
A purpose-built Blemesh-WiFi router that extends the range of a BLE mesh by orders of magnitude. Drop them across the site and the mesh stops being limited by phone-to-phone hops — it spans the whole venue.
Live router showing the admin UI.
Each unit ships pre-imaged and runs a hardened service that comes up automatically on boot. Operators can verify health at a glance:
- Identity — persistent router ID for ops mapping.
- BLE peers — nearby phones currently joined to this router.
- Router peers (Wi-Fi) — sibling routers reachable over the WiFi backbone (TCP & Wi-Fi Aware transports).
- Bridge stats — packets crossed BLE ↔ backbone since last reboot.
Capabilities
- Extends BLE mesh range venue-wide. WiFi backbone between BLE pockets.
- No client wifi or cell required. Phones keep talking BLE — routers are infrastructure, not access points.
- Carries ciphertext only. Routers cannot read messages — encryption is end-to-end on the phones.
- Auto-configures. Routers discover each other and form the mesh on power-up.
Hardware specs
- Platform. Hardened build on a specific Android device — off-the-shelf mobile silicon, custom firmware, easy to source and repair.
- Battery. 4,500–5,000 mAh internal cell.
- Runtime. 8–10 hours on a single charge under typical festival load.
- Power. USB-C. Run on battery, plug into house power for continuous operation, or hot-swap units on a rotation for multi-day events.
- Mounting. Mounts to trusses, light poles, ops tents, and standard event rigging.
Where it fits
- Multi-day music festivals & raves
- Single-day concerts at large venues
- Marathons, triathlons, gravel races, endurance events
- Stadium events & championship games
- Conventions & large conferences
- Disaster comms & emergency response staging
From load-in to last set.
Loxation runs the deployment with your production team. Here's the timeline.
Buy or rent.
Hardware is available to purchase outright or rent per event. Loxation provides deployment design, on-site support, and tear-down with both options. Pricing depends on venue size, attendance, and event duration — talk to us.
Buy
For festivals, venues, and event production companies that run multiple events per year.
- Mesh Routers, mounting hardware, power options
- Loxation deployment design & first-event support included
- Optional: on-site engineering for subsequent events
- Software updates & firmware roadmap access
Rent (per event)
For one-off festivals, single-night raves, single-event productions. We bring the hardware, deploy it, run it, take it home.
- Hardware sized to your venue
- Loxation engineers on-site for the run of show
- Ops console & broadcast tools for your team
- Post-event report (anonymized mesh metrics)
Bring Loxation to your next event.
Tell us about your venue and your dates. We'll come back with a deployment design, a hardware count, and a quote.