Case Study: Castro Theatre achieves reliable high-density Wi‑Fi for large events with Cisco Meraki

Providing a dependable network for event goers at a local landmark

Castro Theatre, a historic San Francisco landmark that relies on outside events for most of its revenue, struggled with an outdated network made up of consumer‑grade routers that produced unreliable Wi‑Fi and threatened its ability to host large conferences. To address the need for high‑density, reliable wireless coverage, Cisco Meraki was brought in to deploy enterprise access points (Meraki MR53E and MR42E) and focused antennas.

Cisco Meraki installed 20 APs and narrow patch antennas in under three days and used Meraki Wireless Health and RF profiles (including Rx‑SOP tuning) to optimize performance for auditorium use. The new Meraki solution reliably supported the Lesbians Who Tech summit (5,000 attendees, ~1,000 concurrent users in the theater), enabled heavy social sharing (10,000+ tweets and 1.2M impressions), and drove a 35% increase in active conference app users and a 51% increase in bookmarked talks, while restoring dependable ticketing and opening up analytics opportunities for the Castro Theatre.

Castro Theatre

Richard Hildreth

Castro Theatre