Offline guide

Finding your group at a festival

The network is right there and still useless. A crowd is the one situation that gets better for a mesh as it gets worse for everything else.

The festival version of "no signal" is different from the others, and more annoying, because the signal is usually there. You have bars. The cell site is a few hundred metres away, possibly parked in a field on a trailer specifically for this weekend. Nothing sends.

The problem is capacity, not coverage. A cell site has a fixed amount of airtime to share out, and it was planned for the few hundred people who normally live within its reach, not the tens of thousands who turned up on Friday. Everyone is attached, everyone is uploading, and the site spends its time managing the scramble.

Why full bars still means nothing sends

Bars measure signal strength, which is about how well you can hear the tower. They say nothing about whether there is room for you to talk. On a packed site the two come apart completely: a strong signal into a site that is already saturated behaves exactly like no signal at all.

Things degrade in a particular order. Big uploads go first, then video, then ordinary data. Calls fail next. Plain SMS tends to survive longest, because texts are tiny and ride the signalling path rather than competing for a data slot. If nothing else is working, try a text.

Venue Wi-Fi rarely rescues it either. Thousands of phones in a field is a hard problem for Wi-Fi too, and the free network at a stadium or a conference is usually saturated for the same reason.

Why a crowd is good news for a mesh

Every other situation in these guides is one where a mesh struggles for want of people. A festival is the opposite. Knit relays messages phone to phone, so the more phones there are between you and the person you want, the further a message can travel. Density is the one thing a mesh actually needs, and a festival has plenty of it.

It also sidesteps the thing that broke: no internet or cell service is required at any point, so a saturated cell site is not in the path and cannot slow anything down. The mesh does not care how many people are queueing for the tower.

For a group who came together, a named group chat is the useful part, end-to-end encrypted so it stays between the people in it. For the whole field, the Nearby room reaches anyone in range, including people you have never met. It is an open broadcast, plaintext by design, which makes it right for asking whether anyone has seen a lost jacket and wrong for anything you would not shout.

Messages that cannot get through right now wait rather than failing, which matters more here than anywhere else: people wander, phones go in pockets, and someone is always briefly out of reach.

Do this before you arrive

Install it at home. On site, the data connection you would need to reach an app store is the exact thing that is broken.
Make the group chat on the way, while everyone is together and it takes ten seconds.
Agree a physical meeting point anyway. A named landmark and a time still works when everything else doesn't.
Bring a power bank. A phone that spends a day hunting for an overloaded tower will be flat by the evening.
Allow it to run in the background, so your phone relays for everyone else while it is in your pocket.

What to expect, honestly

Everyone in your group needs it installed before you get there. There is no fixing that on site.
One hop is tens of metres. On a big site you are relying on other people running it to bridge the gaps, so it works best across a crowd rather than across an empty car park at 3am.
A festival is a noisy place for radio. Thousands of Bluetooth devices in a field crowd the same airwaves the mesh uses, and it is not immune to that.
It will not reach anyone at home. This is for the people on site with you.
It is not how you get help. For a medical emergency find a steward or the welfare tent — they have radios that work, and that is what they are there for.

Common questions

Why doesn't my phone work at a festival when I have full bars?

Bars show signal strength, not spare capacity. The tower is easy to hear and has no room left, because tens of thousands of people are attached to a site planned for a fraction of that. A strong signal into a saturated site behaves like no signal at all.

Does a bigger crowd make Knit work better or worse?

Better, up to a point, and this is the one situation where that is true. Messages travel by hopping between phones, so more people running it means more routes and more reach. The counterweight is radio noise: a field full of Bluetooth devices is a crowded airspace, and the mesh shares it.

Will it reach my friends across the whole site?

It depends on who is in between. Through a dense crowd with other people running Knit, a message can cross far more ground than any single phone reaches. Across an empty stretch with nobody in the middle, it stops at the edge of the last phone.

Does this work at a stadium or a conference too?

Yes, and for the same reason. Packed venues break the mobile network by congestion rather than by lack of coverage, and the venue Wi-Fi is usually just as oversubscribed. The mesh does not touch either one.

Do we all need to be on the same network or carrier?

No. Knit needs no carrier, no SIM, no account and no internet connection — it talks radio to radio between phones, so who you pay for service makes no difference, and a phone with no service at all works fine.