Case Study: Locarno International Film Festival achieves seamless high-density ticket scanning and full-square Wi‑Fi coverage with HPE Aruba Networking

4IT Solutions and Aruba Stage a Cutting-Edge Wireless Technology Display

The Locarno International Film Festival, a nearly 70‑year‑old event held in the 7,560 m² Piazza Grande, was struggling with increasingly difficult entry management as thousands of attendees and tens of thousands of wireless devices saturated the 2.4 GHz band. Organizers engaged 4IT Solutions and Aruba to redesign the Wi‑Fi so 20 wireless readers could reliably scan large volumes of tickets (target: 8,910 scans in 3 hours) without long queues or service interruptions.

4IT and Aruba deployed an Aruba 7010 Mobility Controller, Aruba AP‑275 outdoor access points and 20 wireless barcode scanners, mapped optimal AP placement, tuned radio settings, used spectrum analysis and performed live channel reconfigurations and monitoring during peak events. The solution delivered stable, full‑square coverage and fast mobile scanning—handling 250+ APs and 15,000+ devices onsite—and enabled efficient entry for 164,000 attendees over the festival, eliminated queuing and opened the door to public Wi‑Fi and future event services.

Locarno International Film Festival

Malcolm Tunzi

Head of Information Technology