Each year, in the days before Deershed Festival opens its gates, a significant amount of infrastructure work takes place that most attendees will never see. The stages, the bars, the production — all of it depends on reliable communications being in place before anything else can function. Delivering that communications infrastructure is the role of High Tide Group.
This week we are on site at Deershed, building the complete WiFi and network infrastructure for the event from the ground up. This is the first in a series of daily updates documenting the build as it progresses.
Day 1 — Base Communications
The first priority on any event network build is establishing base communications for the crew and production team. Nothing else moves efficiently without it.
Today the team positioned and commissioned our on-site WiFi cabin — craned into position on the North Yorkshire estate that hosts Deershed each year, and serving as our base of operations, network operations centre, and primary equipment location for the duration of the build.
Initial masts were raised and point-to-point links established, bringing internet connectivity live to the WiFi cabin, the production office, and artist liaison by end of day.
With base comms in place, the wider build begins in earnest tomorrow when the full HTG team joins on site.
Annual Business Continuity Validation
One element of this week's deployment goes beyond the festival build itself. From Tuesday, High Tide Group's entire managed services and network operations function relocates to the Deershed site. The Hartlepool office will be unstaffed for the week.
This is a deliberate and planned part of how High Tide Group operates. Rather than conducting an annual business continuity exercise as a desktop simulation or controlled internal test, we validate our BCP through live operational deployment. Client support, network monitoring, incident response, and managed services are all delivered from an entirely different location — with no degradation in service and no fallback office.
It is, in effect, a proof of concept run under real conditions every year. The festival environment provides exactly the right level of operational challenge — temporary infrastructure, variable connectivity, a physically dispersed team, and live client obligations running in parallel with a complex technical build.
If the business can operate normally from here, it can operate normally from anywhere. That is the point.
The Deershed stage is up. The site is taking shape. The network build is underway.
Follow the full build diary this week on the High Tide Group blog, LinkedIn, and Facebook.