# 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.

Keep track of your friends between sets, agree on a meeting point and share the view from your side of the field. Knit gives nearby phones a way to carry those messages when the event's mobile network is busy.

A strong signal can still come with a crowded network. Thousands of people sharing a cell site may leave little capacity for messages and uploads. Knit connects phones locally over Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

## Why a local connection helps

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

A festival puts plenty of people within a few steps of one another. Every additional Knit phone can provide another hop, helping messages travel across the crowd toward your friends.

The phone mesh works with no internet or cell service required. Messages use local radio links, giving your group another route when the cell network is busy.

Create a named group chat for your crew, end-to-end encrypted so only its members can read it. For a wider hello or a lost-jacket question, try the public Nearby room. It is an open broadcast, plaintext by design, so everyone in range can join in.

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.

## Plan for a good connection

- 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.

## FAQ

### 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?

More Knit phones can mean more routes for a message to take. A busy event also means shared radio airtime, so reach and delivery still depend on the conditions around you.

### 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.

## Read next

- [Texting with no service](https://getknit.app/offline/texting-without-service/index.md): Use nearby phones to keep a conversation moving when cell service is unavailable.
- [Power outages & disasters](https://getknit.app/offline/power-outages/index.md): Home internet goes instantly, cell sites run down over hours. What to expect, and how to keep a street talking.
- [Hiking & backcountry](https://getknit.app/offline/hiking-and-backcountry/index.md): Keep your party in touch along the trail and around camp, with optional LoRa radios for extra reach. Carry a separate device for contacting rescue services.
- [Play the blackout](https://getknit.app/demo/): One of its levels is this exact problem: jam the tower with a festival crowd and get a message across anyway.

Canonical page: https://getknit.app/offline/festivals-and-crowds/