Making Sure Sacramento Pride Never Missed a Sale
Sacramento Pride draws more than 20,000 people to Capitol Mall each year, and the year before working with Talon, a vendor's Wi-Fi hotspots failed mid-festival and took ticketing down with them.
This year, Sacramento Pride came to Talon AV to make sure that never happened again.
Crowd waving Pride and trans flags on an open lawn at an outdoor festival, with stage and video screen in the distance.
The Challenge
Capitol Mall is a tough place to build a network. It's a high-traffic downtown corridor leading to the State Capitol, known for cellular congestion and inconsistent coverage even on a normal day. Sacramento Pride needed reliable Wi-Fi spread across gates, bars, stages, and festival HQ, all supporting ticketing, point-of-sale, and production at once. Past vendor solutions had already failed mid-festival, disrupting ticketing and operations in front of a crowd of 20,000. For an event running entirely on ticket and bar sales, a dropped connection wasn't a minor inconvenience, it was lost revenue in real time.
Talon AV started with a carrier survey ahead of the event to identify the strongest-performing networks in that specific stretch of downtown. From there, the team deployed 14 portable Wi-Fi units across entry gates, bars, and stages, backed by bonded internet at festival HQ for a stable backbone, high-priority data plans to avoid consumer cellular slowdowns, and full-event monitoring with technicians on call by chat and phone throughout the festival.
The Details
Client: Sacramento Pride
Location: Capitol Mall, Downtown Sacramento, CA
Attendees: 20,000+
Services: Cellular-bonded Wi-Fi, live monitoring and remote support
Crowd at an outdoor Pride event cheering with raised hands, Pride flags, and a red flower held up toward the stage.
How We Solved It
Redundancy and real-time support were built into the network from the start, not added after something broke.
Ran a carrier survey ahead of the event to select the strongest-performing networks for that specific location
Deployed 14 portable Wi-Fi units at entry gates, bars, and stages
Built bonded internet at festival HQ for a secure, stable backbone connection
Used high-priority data plans to avoid the slowdowns typical of consumer cellular service
Staffed full-event monitoring with remote technicians available by chat and phone throughout the festival
Three Talon AV crew members smiling at an outdoor front of house station, surrounded by audio gear at a festival.
The Outcome
The Talon AV network held 100% uptime across ticketing and POS for the entire festival. When a separate operations vendor's own hotspots failed partway through the event, the Sacramento Pride team migrated those critical systems onto Talon's network on the spot and kept moving without missing a sale. In one of downtown Sacramento's most congested corridors, the festival ran on reliable coverage from open to close, with infrastructure that's now ready to scale for future events.