Case Study: Monterey Jazz Festival achieves seamless high-density Wi-Fi — 70 GB transferred to thousands of users — with Cisco Meraki

Jazz festival and it’s first WiFi-enabled event; 10GB of data seamlessly transferred

The Monterey Jazz Festival, the longest continuously running jazz festival, needed to provide reliable, first-time event WiFi across its 20-acre, heavily wooded fairgrounds for 38,000 attendees, staff and performers — including support for Yamaha Disklavier RemoteLive real‑time piano transmissions. To meet this high‑density Wireless LAN need, the Festival selected Cisco Meraki High‑Density Wi‑Fi solutions for staff, ticketing and public networks.

Alvarez Technology Group deployed a mix of Cisco Meraki MR16 (indoor) and MR58/MR66 (outdoor) access points and used the Meraki cloud dashboard to set up four SSIDs (private staff/performer and public networks with throttling). The Cisco Meraki deployment seamlessly handled over 2,000 clients and transferred more than 70 GB of data over three days (with 50% on the guest network), enabled 1,400+ app downloads, and delivered consistent, high‑performance connectivity for live streams and real‑time musical performances.

Monterey Jazz Festival

Curtis Thomas

Director of Managed Services