Organizers of the recent Fine Art in the Park event were facing the same spotty internet challenges that organizers experienced with the Los Altos Arts & Wine Festival. Then an eleventh-hour solution saved the day.
A networking (pun intended) connection among Rotarians led to a Los Altos-based tech company installing infrastructure in Lincoln Park the Friday before the Aug. 12-13 event. The result? No internet issues among the vendors and attendees, making this year’s Fine Art in the Park one of the most financially successful in the event’s 48-year history. The numbers have yet to be fully tallied, but organizers estimate proceeds in excess of $500,000. Approximately $100,000 of event proceeds benefit the Rotary Club of Los Altos’ many local and global projects.
Last year’s event, featuring more than 150 artists, food vendors and live entertainment, had problems with electronic payment transactions – thanks to poor internet service at the park. Such complaints also are notorious throughout downtown Los Altos. One merchant at the Arts & Wine Festival in early July claimed to have lost $8,000 in business due to lousy internet access.
“This is like not having a cash register,” said Herb Marshall, operations director of Fine Art in the Park.
The open-air art show was headed for a fate similar to the Arts & Wine Festival, until Rotarian Annie Ju, who also serves on the Los Altos Hills Technology Committee, raised the issue with her committee. Fellow committee member George Lee, who runs the Los Altos-based company Techcam, offered a solution.
Although his company’s primary focus is providing camera systems for construction sites (including the Los Altos Community Center), Lee said, “through these projects, we’ve gotten really good at providing fast internet in hard-to-reach places.”
Lee and his group set up five temporary Wi-Fi access points at the park with SpaceX Starlink as the primary connection and T-Mobile as an automatic failover, or backup. T-Mobile is the only major provider with coverage at Lincoln Park, but reliance on T-Mobile alone with hundreds of visitors was problematic. A private Wi-Fi network was provided for the vendors and a public Wi-Fi network for guests.
The result?
“Over 300 unique devices connected to our network over the two-day event, with a concurrent average of 60 devices,” Lee said.
“We had perfect Wi-Fi throughout the park,” said Rotarian Sandy Mingia. “We aren’t going to miss any sales!”
Added Marshall: “It was a game-changer on the transaction side of things. One of the big complaints we had in years past is as more and more transactions are going digital, we have parts of the park that just really have very little to no cell reception.”
Marshall said the Rotary Club will seek Techcam’s help for next year’s show as well.
“I don’t know how we go backwards on this one,” he said. “I’m hopeful that the city at some point might be able to provide some sort of downtown Wi-Fi that might extend into the park space there. But that’s a much longer endeavor, I think. So, in the interim, I think this is what we have to do.”
“We are happy to help out the community whenever we can,” Lee said.
For more information, on Fine Art in the Park, visit
rotaryartshow.com.
For more information on Techcam, visit techcam.net.
