German Savings Banks Congress 2023, Hanover, May 2023

In its role of organiser of the “Sparkassentag” (German Savings Banks Congress), the Deutsche Sparkassen- und Giroverband (German Savings Banks Finance Group) invites distinguished national and international guests from the worlds of politics and business to its annual event – this year Chancellor Scholz, Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Habeck, Minister of Finance Lindner, President of the ECB Lagarde and former president Gauck accepted the invitation. With their speeches and participation in panel discussions, the guests make the two-day congress one of Germany's top business events.

The congress took place in two halls of the exhibition centre: one of them accommodated the main stage, while the second housed the trade fair space for the exhibiting companies. Congress and catering areas were set up in other, smaller halls and rooms. We were hired for the technical implementation of rigging, lighting and audio as well as for event IT for the entire event.

The latter service involved setting up full-coverage public WLAN for visitors in the two halls as well as in the adjacent foyers and event spaces. We also created a LAN for internal networks and technical services. Our brief was to provide Internet access for around 3,000 people as well as separate access points for video streams from the congress hall. Backup and security measures combined with specifications for bandwidth splitting further increased the level of complexity and meant even more requirements had to be met. However, we found the ideal solution by integrating the exhibition centre's existing infrastructure.

The requirements for operating such a high-density WLAN differ from those when designing a wide-area WLAN. Appropriate hardware, capacity planning and a design that takes the structural situation into account are all necessary when it comes to installing the ideal number of access points to provide high-performance WLAN for a lot of devices over a relatively small area. In this project we used a location heatmap, a tool that shows us the areas in which the demand for WiFi is particularly high.

The technical team at the Hanover exhibition centre specified transfer points to the in-house passive infrastructure so that we could connect our data points by fibre-optic cable to set up the LAN for all of the rooms. In the exhibition halls we created our own redundant fibre-optic infrastructure linking all data points.

We integrated our PoE switches in the rig via the data points – which also featured built-in redundancy. These switches, in turn, were connected to about 45 access points positioned throughout the rig. The networks for the technical systems, offices, exhibitors and another 20 or so access points were connected to these various data points.

We set up a Network Operation Centre (NOC) to control and monitor the network – with a 10 Gbps backbone also equipped with redundancy. Deutsche Telekom also installed two WAN connections in the NOC. These two WAN connections were each linked to two core routers to form our core network. The backup scenarios as well as the traffic splitting and limiting systems were implemented using VRRP, shaping and policy-based routing.

Telekom provided a separate connection for the livestream, which we monitored while keeping an LTE multichannel router with binding function in reserve for the backup scenario.

To ensure our team was able to give the best possible support, we set up jump hosting solutions connected to our computer centre. This gave us secure access to our systems whenever and wherever it was needed. We also implemented network monitoring of all the components via these jump hosts.