In its role of organiser of the "German Savings Banks Congress", the German Savings Banks Finance Group invites distinguished national and international guests from the worlds of politics and business to its prestigious event. With their speeches and participation in panel discussions, the guests make the two-day congress one of Germany's top business events. "We need to talk. Because it's more than just a matter of money" was the slogan of the German Savings Bank Congress 2023 held on 31st May and 1st June in the halls of the Hanover trade fair centre. The event focused on pressing questions of the present day: how do we make our society crisis-proof? How do we stop inflation from deepening rifts in society? How can we advance the growth of renewable sources of energy?

German Chancellor Scholz, Vice Chancellor and Minister for Economic Affairs Habeck, Finance Minister Lindner, President of the ECB Lagarde and former German president Gauck joined other top speakers in expressing their opinion on these questions and a host of other issues. The head of the DSGV finance group said: "Our goal is to work together on re-prioritising the current challenges facing Germany and Europe, reviewing past assumptions and outlining possible solutions. At the same time, we want to elaborate the values and the role of the savings banks and their finance group."

The congress is usually held every three years but was last staged in 2019 due to the corona situation. This year's event 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; we also contracted a partner company to provide video, camera and broadcasting services.

Our Event IT 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 3000 people via this system as well as separate access points for video streams from the congress hall. Backup and other security measures combined with specifications for bandwidth splitting further increased the level of complexity of the network 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.