Ten Days, Three Million Square Feet, Zero Outages

The Red Sea International Film Festival is one of the region's most significant cultural events: ten days of screenings, workshops, panels and red-carpet nights drawing global film professionals, celebrities, international press and VIP guests to Jeddah.

That audience creates an unusual network problem. Most venues worry about download speed. Here the traffic that mattered ran the other way — broadcast feeds going out, press filing to deadline, celebrities posting live to millions of followers. Upload capacity, not download, decides whether the event looks well-run to the outside world.

Those user groups also cannot share a network. Press need guaranteed throughput. VIPs need secure, differentiated access. Broadcast needs protected bandwidth that nothing else can touch. And the public need enough of a connection that a red-carpet crowd of thousands doesn't collapse the whole thing.

All of it had to be designed, built and proven across eight sites and three million square feet — indoors and out — inside an implementation window the project team describes as extremely limited.

• Upload-dominant traffic: live broadcast, press filing and social posting
• Four distinct user groups needing genuinely separate networks
• Peak density during screenings, panels and award nights
• Indoor theatres and outdoor activation spaces across 3 million sq ft
• A fixed opening night and a very short build window

The core was built for high availability from the start, carrying 5 Gbps in HA mode behind a next-generation firewall — with ISP-agnostic redundancy, so the festival was not dependent on any single provider staying up for ten days.

Above it we deployed a multi-layer wireless backbone using high-density access points optimised for 802.11be — Wi-Fi 7 — for the capacity and latency that live media work demands. Then the networks were separated by purpose rather than by location, with quality-of-service rules prioritising mission-critical traffic: live feeds and broadcast uploads take precedence over everything else, always.

The scope went well beyond WiFi. This was end-to-end IT infrastructure — LAN and WLAN, plus Dante for audio over IP and NDI for video over IP. Those are professional broadcast protocols with strict latency and timing requirements, and carrying them properly is a different discipline from delivering guest internet.

Delivery was led by Hassan Mumtaz, Head of Projects at EZELINK, with his team on the ground from survey through de-rig. The sequence never varies on an event build, because the deadline never moves — what varies is how much of it you can compress without leaving the testing until the audience arrives.

The network carried thousands of simultaneous connections through the festival with no declared outages, sustaining the throughput that uninterrupted video upload and live media reporting require.

The measure that matters for a cultural event is not a number on a dashboard, though — it is whether the coverage happened. International media teams posted and filed instantly. Talent shared to their own audiences from the red carpet without waiting. And access held up equally across indoor theatres and outdoor spaces, which on a site of this size is the harder half.

• No declared outages across the full ten-day festival
• Thousands of concurrent connections sustained at peak
• Uninterrupted video upload for international media teams
• Consistent coverage indoors and outdoors — red carpet, Culture Square and the Souk
• Daily health reporting and peak-load analytics throughout

"Ezelink's team was responsive and proactive throughout the festival — a true partner in ensuring smooth operations."

IT Director · Red Sea Film Foundation