Making the Internet Invisible for a 500-Person Chicago Conference
A production team walked into a Chicago hotel facing a steep in-house internet quote and a show that couldn't afford a single dead zone, not at the keynote, not in the exhibit hall, not backstage.
They brought Talon in to build something better.
Two Talon AV crew members working together to terminate network cabling during event setup.
The Challenge
The show needed full coverage across a general session for roughly 500 people, an exhibit hall, several simultaneous breakout rooms, production offices, and backstage, all running reliably for three full show days. The venue's own quote was expensive, and a single shared network meant a single point of failure. If the internet dropped during the keynote or stalled a breakout, that wasn't just an inconvenience, it was the show stalling in front of the room. The team needed a network invisible enough that no one thought about it, and resilient enough that no one had to.
Talon built a modular backbone shaped around how the show actually moved. Portable throw-down kits brought each breakout room online in about five minutes, clean and repeatable. For the general session and expo, a larger core combined around 10 cellular modems across multiple carriers, load-balancing traffic into a hard-wired access-point grid built to hold up under higher density. A separate dedicated connection kept the production office running uploads and show ops without ever competing with attendee traffic.
The Details
Client: Confidential, a 500-person corporate conference
Location: Chicago hotel
Event Type: Three-day general session, exhibit hall, and multi-room breakout conference
Headcount: ~500 general session attendees, plus exhibit hall and breakout traffic
Duration: Three show days
Services: Event Wi-Fi and production internet, network design and deployment, live remote monitoring, on-call phone support
Networking equipment rack with Peplink access point, switch, and power distribution, set up under purple venue lighting.
How We Solved It
Redundancy and speed were designed into the network from day zero, not patched in after a problem showed up.
Deployed portable throw-down kits that brought each breakout room online in about five minutes, using a consistent, repeatable playbook
Built a general session and expo core from roughly 10 cellular modems spread across multiple carriers, load-balanced into a hard-wired access-point grid
Stood up the entire GS and expo core, tested and ready, in about three hours on day zero
Ran a dedicated connection for the production office, separate from attendee traffic, so uploads and show comms stayed smooth
Provided continuous live remote monitoring on Central Time through all show hours, with phone support on call for the on-site crew
Designed the architecture to be carrier-diverse from the ground up, with room to integrate venue handoffs or satellite backup like Starlink when needed
Peplink wireless access point mounted on a tripod stand in a hotel hallway, extending event network coverage.
The Outcome
Attendees saw consistent performance across the venue, around 200 Mbps down, even as rooms filled and the schedule shifted. The production team got a dedicated line that simply worked, keeping content transfers and show communications smooth throughout. The whole system deployed faster and landed significantly under the venue's own internet quote, and because the network was spread across multiple carriers, one tower having a bad moment never became the show's problem.