Coverage that grows with the crowd
Tens of thousands of phones in one venue saturate every tower. On the mesh each of them is a relay, so coverage improves as the crowd grows. Attendee apps, staff channels, venue services, and ticket scanning keep working with no backhaul in the loop.
A security post phone dispatches the medical team across a packed venue over the attendee mesh network while the cell tower is saturated, reaching the gate operations dashboard in seconds.
Attendee devices relay an encrypted staff message across the venue while the tower serves nobody.
Full venue, dead network
Cellular saturates at capacity. Sixty thousand phones on three towers means nothing gets through. Attendee apps, payments, and staff comms all degrade together at exactly peak load.
More people, more relays. Attendee and staff devices carry traffic for each other over BLE and WiFi Direct. Coverage grows as the venue fills, the inverse of how cellular behaves.
Staff traffic gets its own lane. Operations comms ride the crowd mesh inside MLS-encrypted sessions, with OfflineID keeping security, medical, and production roles separate.
Density as infrastructure
Chart: as a venue fills, the share of cellular capacity each person gets falls toward nothing, while mesh capacity rises with every device that joins.
Cellular shares a fixed amount of tower capacity across everyone in range. Sixty thousand phones on three towers means each person gets almost none of it at exactly peak load.
The mesh adds a relay with every phone that joins. Attendee and staff devices carry traffic for each other over BLE and WiFi Direct, and battery-aware relay promotion keeps the load on well-charged phones.
Operations get their own lane. Staff traffic rides the same crowd mesh inside MLS-encrypted sessions, with OfflineID keeping security, medical, and production roles separate from attendee traffic.
What you can build
Each of these runs on the shipped SDK primitives.
Offline messaging, schedules, and wayfinding in your existing app, moving attendee phone to attendee phone over BLE and WiFi Direct.
A staff channel that rides the same crowd mesh inside MLS-encrypted sessions, with roles authenticated by OfflineID.
Wayfinding, live polling, announcements, and file drops as request and response services attendee apps find by name.
Services a venue can publish
- Wayfinding and schedules
- Session times, rooms, and routes from the organiser's device, invoked by name with no internet in the loop.
- Live polling and announcements
- Broadcast to the crowd and collect responses without backhaul.
- File drops
- Maps, setlists, and media up to 100 MB moved across the venue in ordered chunks.
- Staff operations channels
- MLS group channels for security, medical, and production, authenticated per role.
- Post-event review
- An opt-in telemetry record of transport switches and delivery latency per hop, uploaded by the SDK once a link is back.
What a ticketing platform builds on it
- Ticket issuance and verification
- Your platform signs each ticket with its issuer key and can bind it to the buyer's device key, which OfflineID ties to their account. Scanners verify a ticket's signature on the device, with no network round trip.
- Gate scanning and entry validation
- Gate devices share scan state in a replicated document over the mesh, so a ticket admitted at one gate reads as used at every gate the mesh reaches, with no internet. Box office devices can publish a lookup service that scanners invoke by name for will-call and exceptions.
- Fraud prevention and ticket authentication
- A forged ticket fails verification, and a ticket bound to the holder's phone passes only when that phone signs a fresh challenge from the scanner, so a screenshot cannot get in. If two gates lose contact and both scan one ticket, the duplicate is flagged when their records merge.
- Revenue and resale tracking
- Each admission is a signed record of ticket, gate, and time, and per-gate counts accumulate across scanners as they sync. Your platform matches those records against primary sales and resales, so attendance and revenue reconcile even for a show that ran offline.
- Ticketing system integration
- Scan records return to your existing ticketing system through your own backend once a connection is back, each with a stable scan ID so a resend is not counted twice. Where any device has a path out, the hosted relay carries them sooner to a collector you run, and telemetry shows operations how the gate network behaved.
The primitives behind it
- DORS
- Attendee and staff devices meshed with multi-hop relay and battery-aware promotion, so well-charged phones carry the mesh and low ones just ride it. How mesh networking works.
- Service discovery
- Venue services published, discovered, and invoked request and response like an API endpoint. How service discovery works.
- OfflineID
- Staff and ticket holder Ed25519 identities verified device to device, so operations traffic stays separate from the crowd it rides on and a ticket is checked with no round trip. How offline identity works.
- Edge sync
- Scan state and admission counts replicated between gate devices, merging when they reconnect. How edge sync works.
- Telemetry
- Transport switches and delivery latency per hop, kept for post-event review. How telemetry works.
- The live network
- Event networks are visible on the live network map as they happen.
Live events and ticketing FAQ
How can an event app keep working when there is no cell service?
By moving traffic device to device instead of through the tower. With the SDK embedded, attendee phones mesh over BLE and WiFi Direct with multi-hop relay, so schedules, wayfinding, announcements, and messaging keep flowing while cellular is saturated.
Why is there no signal at stadiums and festivals?
Tens of thousands of phones share a handful of cell sectors, and capacity divides across all of them at once. The mesh inverts that: every attendee device is a relay, so throughput grows with the crowd instead of collapsing under it.
Do attendees need to install something?
The mesh embeds in your existing event app through the SDK. Any device running the app becomes a relay automatically.
Can ticket scanners work with no internet connection?
Yes. Your platform signs each ticket with its issuer key and scanners keep the public key, so the SDK verifies the signature on the scanner itself. Gate devices share scan state over the mesh, so a ticket admitted at one gate reads as used at the others without a network round trip.
How does this stop duplicate and fake tickets?
A forged or altered ticket fails signature verification. A ticket bound to the holder's device key passes only when that phone signs a fresh challenge from the scanner, so a screenshot or a copied code cannot get in. If two gates are cut off from each other and both scan the same ticket, the duplicate is flagged when their scan records merge, and your admission rules decide what happens next.
How do scan records get back to our ticketing system?
Scanners keep every record on the device and send them through your own backend once a connection returns, each with a stable scan ID so a record resent after an outage is not counted twice. When any device on the mesh has a path out, the hosted relay can carry records sooner to a collector you run. Your ticketing system stays the system of record.
What does it do to attendee battery life?
Relay duty is battery-aware: by default a device stops relaying below 30% charge, and operators can pin relay priority to always, auto, or never per device class. Well-charged devices carry the mesh; low ones just ride it.
Can this handle a stadium-scale crowd?
Density is the favorable case: the mesh gains capacity with each device. The live network already sustains 11,500+ local networks, with event-driven spikes visible on the network map.
How do we trial it at one event?
A scoped evaluation instruments one event or venue over 4 to 16 weeks, from SDK integration to post-event telemetry review. Contact us to scope it.
What can we learn after the event?
The opt-in telemetry stream records transport switches, routing decisions, and delivery latencies per hop, so operations gets a post-event picture of exactly how the mesh behaved as the venue filled and emptied.
Does this need any venue infrastructure at all?
No. The mesh is made of the devices already in the building. Fixed hardware relays are optional anchors for gates, medical stations, and back-of-house areas where crowd density is low but coverage still matters.
