Beating the crowds. Reliable 4G in ultra-densely populated areas?

[JDada]

I posted a while ago looking for antennae that would help me, but signal strength doesn't seem to be an issue...

My company owns a collection of ATT and Verizon 4G hotspots. I'm looking at the possibility of using these to deliver internet-based services to temporary locations. Crowds can be in the tens to hundreds of thousands, with all kinds of additional interference going on in the form of concert stages, generators, and all the other things you would expect to see at a multi-day music festival, fair, etc.

What I've seen so far is that as the crowds grow, so does latency. At a certain point, the 4G internet connection becomes pretty much unusable. Signal strength isn't a problem as I pretty consistently get 3-4 bars on the hotspots, I'm guessing its just that the cellular network gets overloaded with so many peoples' phones in the area. Is there any way I can get around this to ensure that my hotspots work reliably?

[strutswell]

What I've seen so far is that as the crowds grow, so does latency. At a certain point, the 4G internet connection becomes pretty much unusable. Signal strength isn't a problem as I pretty consistently get 3-4 bars on the hotspots, I'm guessing its just that the cellular network gets overloaded with so many peoples' phones in the area. Is there any way I can get around this to ensure that my hotspots work reliably?

No. If the cellular network is overloaded, then there is nothing you can do, there is no way around it.

Your hotspots cannot demand better Quality of Service, there is no way to get a higher priority (unless the carrier provides this as some kind of VIP top-tier service...Havent seen this in North America but maybe in a more developed country overseas?)

So in conclusion, you're out of luck. If you want to provide wifi hotspots that work, then you need your own backhaul (ie. DSL or cable internet) instead of relying on the overloaded cellular network.

[Kies]

Get T-Mobile/at&t/VZ hotspots and hope one of them works. When T-Mobile and Sprint launches their LTE networks they should be largely unphased by large crowds for the first six months or so
I was at a small concert myself and T-Mobile was the most reliable carrier there with 3Mbps DL speeds throughout the entire event. Sprint/VZ/AT&T all collectively had serious sevice problems
From my T-Mobile Galaxy S II