It is famous for many things, but the National Eisteddfod – Europe’s largest touring cultural festival, dedicated to celebrating the Welsh language, music, poetry, and arts – isn’t usually a hot bed of tech innovation. However, it has become the latest in a growing trend for ‘mobile mobile’ with VodafoneThree deploying temporary 4G and 5G infrastructure at the festival and marking how operators worldwide experiment with increasingly flexible ways to connect major live events.
For visitors, better coverage is becoming about far more than posting photographs: it now underpins tickets, payments, safety, accessibility and the event experience itself. As a result, VodafoneThree is deploying a temporary mobile mast at the National Eisteddfod of Wales this week to accommodate the sharp rise in mobile traffic expected when as many as 175,000 people descend on rural Pembrokeshire.
The operator will install a Cell on Wheels, or COW, providing dedicated 4G and 5G capacity across the festival site at Llantwd, Llandudoch. The week-long celebration of Welsh language and culture begins on Saturday 1 August.
The portable mast is designed to prevent the local network becoming overwhelmed when thousands of devices attempt to connect simultaneously. It will serve customers of both Vodafone and Three, following upgrades that have enabled most of VodafoneThree’s temporary sites to support subscribers from both sides of the newly merged business.
For visitors, the most noticeable difference should be faster and more reliable calling, messaging and mobile data – even when attendance peaks. But the deployment also illustrates how connectivity has become part of the operational infrastructure of a live event.
Exhibitors and local businesses depend on mobile connections to process card and wallet payments. Broadcasters and creators need sufficient uplink capacity to send video from the site, while organisers require reliable communications to coordinate staff, security and emergency responses. Visitors increasingly rely on smartphones for tickets, programmes, maps, transport information and finding friends.
A loss of signal at a modern festival is consequently no longer just an irritation, it can prevent someone entering the venue, buying food, accessing information or contacting their group.
Bringing the network to the crowd
COWs contain much of the equipment found at a permanent mobile site but mount it on a trailer so it can be moved to wherever temporary demand is expected. Once the event is over, the equipment can be removed and deployed elsewhere.
VodafoneThree plans to make more than 130 COW deployments during 2026, covering festivals, agricultural shows and major sporting occasions. The number deployed at each event depends upon the expected audience, terrain and size of the site.
At the Royal Welsh Show earlier this summer, its temporary equipment carried enough data to share the equivalent of more than 13 million photographs. The operator also deployed additional capacity at Wimbledon, BST Hyde Park, the Isle of Wight Festival, the British Grand Prix and Royal Ascot.
During BST Hyde Park, the temporary network handled the equivalent of more than 60 years of continuous high-quality music streaming. At Silverstone, the volume was equivalent to streaming the British Grand Prix almost 24,000 times in HD.
Although those comparisons are designed to make large data totals more digestible, they reveal the scale of the change confronting operators. Live-event traffic is no longer dominated by downloads. Tens of thousands of spectators are simultaneously uploading photographs, short-form video and live streams, placing heavy demands on uplink capacity that was once primarily needed by professional broadcasters.
The 2026 deployment programme forms part of VodafoneThree’s £11bn UK network investment. It also gives the merged company an opportunity to combine its spectrum and infrastructure while its permanent network integration continues. In March, the operator said its COWs at Cheltenham Festival had delivered downlink speeds of up to 1.4Gbps and uploads of up to 190Mbps. VodafoneThree’s 2026 COW programme includes the London Marathon, Wimbledon, the Scottish Open and numerous festivals and race meetings.
A global herd
VodafoneThree is far from alone in moving mobile capacity around according to demand. In the US, T-Mobile deployed multiple COWs across the Coachella Valley for the festival’s two weekends in April 2026, supplementing the permanent network in the areas expected to experience the greatest traffic. T-Mobile said engineers had prepared both the festival grounds and surrounding area for the influx of hundreds of thousands of visitors.
Deutsche Telekom has developed a smaller “Cell Tower to Go” that packages 4G and 5G equipment into a compact container. Its antennas extend to eight metres, while the system can be transported and installed by one person in less than an hour. The design potentially makes temporary coverage available to smaller events that cannot justify the logistics and cost of a conventional mobile mast. Deutsche Telekom has positioned it for concerts, sporting events, business sites and emergency response.
At permanent venues, operators are combining temporary capacity with dense in-building systems. Before the 2025 Super Bowl in New Orleans, AT&T upgraded the distributed antenna system inside the Superdome. The network subsequently carried almost 29TB of data during the game – the equivalent, AT&T calculated, of 5.8 million social posts containing photographs. The Superdome deployment demonstrates how major venues are increasingly being designed as high-density mobile environments rather than buildings to which mobile coverage is added afterwards.
From extra capacity to guaranteed connectivity
The next step is not simply installing more radio equipment. Operators are beginning to divide 5G networks into virtual “slices”, each providing defined levels of capacity, latency and reliability for a particular service.
At a Stockholm football derby in 2025, Three Sweden and Ericsson provided press photographers with a dedicated 5G standalone network slice. This allowed them to transmit high-resolution images from pitch-side even while 28,333 spectators were using the same physical network. The trial showed how broadcasters, emergency teams, payment providers or event organisers could be protected from congestion without requiring an entirely separate mobile system.
Orange went further at the Paris 2024 Olympics, constructing private standalone 5G networks at selected venues. These carried footage from cameras on boats during sailing and kitesurfing events, enabling perspectives that would have been difficult to obtain using conventional broadcast equipment. Orange’s Olympic deployment used public mobile coverage for spectators alongside private connectivity for production and operational services.
For customers, this evolution could make live events more dependable and more interactive. Reliable uplinks can support instant multi-angle replays, augmented-reality information, live translation, captions and other accessibility services. Stable connectivity also makes cashless venues, digital queueing and real-time travel updates more practical.
It could, however, create new expectations. Once tickets, payments, maps and safety information all depend on the phone, connectivity becomes a core part of the event’s duty of care. Organisers will need contingency plans for flat batteries, incompatible devices and visitors who cannot – or do not want to – use digital services.
VodafoneThree’s Eisteddfod COW is therefore more significant than a temporary solution for sharing festival photographs. It represents a shift towards networks that follow crowds, expand for a particular occasion and eventually allocate guaranteed performance to the services that need it most.
The live event of the future will not simply have mobile coverage. It will have a network designed around the occasion—and visitors will increasingly judge the event by whether that network works.
