From vendors to VIPs: eero delivered seamless connectivity.

How eero and F3 Technologies powered reliable, high-speed wifi across the Palm Tree Music Festival.

Festivals are a blast—until the wifi breaks. Then they’re a nightmare.

Behind the scenes of the 2025 Palm Tree Music Festival, held at the Santa Barbara Polo & Racquet Club, having access to reliable wifi was mission-critical for the vendors, artists, and VIP areas. 

If the network goes down, POS systems freeze. Booths go cash-only and guests can’t get their orders. That’s not just frustrating—it’s lost revenue.

Enter eero and IT services company F3 Technologies.

Big events are notoriously tough places to get a good signal. The strain on a network is higher than ever, with hundreds of people using devices at the same time, in the same spot.

“Wifi at festivals is imperative. Take a restaurant and a bar, multiply it by 100, and that’s what we were dealing with.”

F3 Technologies
CEO, Dan Diaz

F3 Technologies, which manages networking for restaurants, retail, and high-volume events, was brought in to ensure everything—from the merch areas to backstage trailers—had internet that worked.

That means:

  • Dozens of vendors running cloud-based POS systems, constantly processing orders
  • Touring artists with their own social media teams
  • Thousands of attendees carrying phones and generating local interference

For an important job like this, F3 Technologies went with gear they could trust. They set up multiple eero Outdoor 7 access points to deliver stable, fast wifi for the sold-out event. The weather-ready devices are designed to work in all types of conditions and around the foot traffic you’d expect on a polo field packed with festival-goers. The units were installed outside, Powered over Ethernet, and left in place overnight—no tents, no extra protection, no problem.

“You’ve got wifi from the event, from the venue, from people setting up hotspots … everyone is competing for the same airspace,” said eero Senior Solutions Architect Drew Lentz from the event.

That airspace gets crowded fast. When that happens, the network doesn’t just slow down—it can fall apart. With eero gear, F3 Technologies built a simple, yet strong, wifi network across the festival grounds.  

“You don’t have to think about it working. It just works the way that it should,” Lentz added.

How does it work?

The on-site team monitored everything live using eero Insight, a cloud-based remote network management tool available via a desktop dashboard and in the eero app. Even as hundreds of people connected to wifi at the same time, the networking was easy, efficient, and out of sight. Average channel usage stayed low (~17% in technical terms), even as thousands of smartphones connected. There were zero surprise reboots. And the outdoor access points used just 6.8 watts of power. 

They were able to pull this off thanks to:

  • Guest network isolation and automatic firmware updates, which meant fewer security-related incidents and reduced liability
  • Role-based access control (RBAC) helped ensure secure access
  • Real-time visibility across all networks, including diagnostics, bandwidth analytics, and performance history—reducing their time-to-resolution and admin load

From food trucks to retail booths, eero kept business moving

McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams—the beloved Santa Barbara-based brand—was scooping cones and taking orders on a Toast POS system powered by eero wifi. 

“The location is beautiful,” said McConnell’s CEO Michael Palmer, “but a spot like this would typically have a horrible connection.”

Not so this time around. There was no lag. No dropouts. Just scoop, tap, done. When lines are long and your team’s moving fast, that kind of reliability matters, and the McConnell’s team didn’t have to lift a finger to keep their devices connected to wifi. 

“We were out on a polo field, serving thousands of people—and the wifi was flawless. I’m a big fan of eero.”

McConnell’s Fine Ice Creams
CEO, Michael Palmer

Over at the Aviator Nation booth, people lined up to pay for branded hats, shirts, hoodies, and more. The high-volume retail brand sets up at around 26 events every year. The company’s Event Production Coordinator Andrew Pintar was also impressed by the dependable wifi.

“It’s been absolutely perfect, wifi is extremely important for us.”

Aviator Nation
Event Production Coordinator, Andrew Pintar

The Palm Tree Music Festival wasn’t just a showcase for artists and local businesses. It was a showcase for invisible infrastructure. One where businesses like McConnell’s could show up, plug in, and get down to business—because someone else had already set them up with reliable wifi. 

TAKEAWAY

F3 Tech and eero helped make sure that what mattered—music, food, fun—stayed front and center at the Palm Tree Music Festival.

During the event, vendors were able to focus on processing hundreds of thousands of dollars in transactions and not have to worry about their wifi.

And if eero can do this for a large music festival, just think what they can do for your business.

Get in touch for your next event that needs fast, reliable wifi: https://eero.com/business/contact-us

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