A network you don't have to truck in.
Festivals build a city for a weekend, and the network is the one thing that can't be built fast enough. Zeva runs inside your festival app and turns every attendee's phone into a relay, so cashless, ordering and friend-finding keep working at the main stage when every carrier is flat.
Written for festival producers, operations directors and cashless and payments leads.
- No COWs, no pop-up Wi-Fi contracts, no Monday teardown
- Lives inside your existing festival app
- Capacity rises with every attendee through the gate
The numbers behind the pitch
- year-over-year data volume at the 2025 Indy 500, 172 TB in a single day
- +35%
- Source: Verizon
- higher per-capita spend at cashless events, an uplift that depends on connectivity
- 15–30%
- Source: Fiserv, SumUp
- transactions per 15 minutes when the network fails
- 450 → 60
- Source: Fiserv, SumUp
What breaks on site
Temporary sites inherit permanent connectivity problems, and the fixes are rented by the weekend.
Temporary sites, permanent problems
Every season you rent cell-on-wheels and pop-up Wi-Fi for tens of thousands per event, tear it down on Monday and do it again next year.
Cashless dies at peak
Top-ups and tap-to-pay stall exactly when the main stage fills. When networks fail, transaction throughput drops from 450 to 60 per 15 minutes.
Attendees lose each other
No service means no texts. Groups split, meet-up points fail and your safety team fields calls that an app could have answered.
Sponsors can't reach the crowd
Activations and push offers queue behind a saturated carrier and land after the moment has passed.
What changes with Zeva
The densest crowd of the weekend becomes the strongest network on site.
Bars and vendors keep processing
Orders and payments route phone-to-phone to a gateway with backhaul. The twenty-minute peak that used to kill throughput becomes the moment you sell the most.
Friends find friends with no service
Messaging and Find run locally over the mesh. Attendees locate their group, and your ops team can message zones directly.
Density you can see
Relay topology gives you a live picture of where the crowd is thickening, before the barrier team feels it.
Nothing to load in or strike
No hardware, no cabling, no teardown. Zeva ships inside your app update and works on the farm, in the parking lot and along the shuttle line.
How it runs on a festival site
Three steps between signing and show day. Your cashless and ordering providers keep working exactly as they do now.
- 1
Embed
Add the Zeva SDK to your festival app, or ship the white-label Zeva app. Attendees opt in when they install, and relaying starts automatically on site.
- 2
Gateway
A handful of gateways with backhaul sit at bars, box office and ops. The mesh carries orders and messages to them across the crowd.
- 3
Operate
A show-day dashboard shows mesh health, density and throughput. Your payments provider sees transactions arrive as usual.
Where festivals use Zeva
- 01Cashless at the barsTop-ups and tap-to-pay keep processing through the headliner set.
- 02Vendor and merch orderingOrder from the crowd, get a pickup alert, skip the line.
- 03Group Find and meet-up pointsAttendees find each other across the site with no service.
- 04Zone-targeted safety messagingWeather holds and crowd instructions reach the field they're meant for.
- 05Sponsor activationsOffers land in the moment, with proof of delivery for the sponsor deck.
- 06Shuttle and campground wayfindingRouting and queue hints that work in the lot and on the walk back.
Questions from festivals
The objections we hear most from teams like yours, answered plainly.
Pilot Zeva at your next festival.
We're selecting 2026–27 festivals for validated deployments with published uptime data. Bring your attendance and site map; we'll bring the gateway plan.