EE service at the Glastonbury Festival 2024

[TheWookiee]

I am working (volunteering) at the Glastonbury Festival again and would like to know if EE plan to upgrade the service for consumers this year? 

The service in 2022 (the last year that EE was an official partner) worked generally well and I was able to use it when needed.  Before Glastonbury 2023, I started a second SIM service (in a dual eSIM phone) with Voda, and compared EE and Voda back to back. Voda service was consistently better; EE signal strength was good but messages would often not send and photos wouldn’t upload.

My EE contract is coming to an end, and is a premium price (especially for use abroad). I’m wondering if I should renew. Mobile service is very important to me because I am all over and outside the site, sometimes in locations where the radios don’t work. Service availability is more important than price.

[bristolian]

EE offered a broadly similar setup at Glastonbury 2023 as per previous years, with the same number of temporary sites installed in the same locations, and additional 4G/5G carriers.

[TheWookiee]

Thanks for your prompt reply. Do you have any insight into plans for 2024?

The festival capacity is flat 2022 - 2023 - 2024 but presumably social media growth is driving increased demand so a similar EE setup would result in reduced quality of service. There was also an unsatisfied demand in 2023 (evidenced by my own experience and several other people that I spoke to).

[infinitywaiter]

Even with Vodafone taking over from EE at Glastonbury from 2023 as the Official Connectivity Partner, EE themselves still had a big presence there...

See here from EE themselves:

https://twitter.com/EE/status/1666818026304598017

https://community.ee.co.uk/t5/Mobile-Network-discussions/EE-Coverage-at-Glastonbury-2023/td-p/125452...

And as @bristolian has already stated too, EE will be back again this year to make sure that their network runs perfectly fine once again.

The reason your Vodafone sim might have seemed to be working better in 2023, was more likely due to it being Vodafone's first year of being the Official Partner, and so they did everything they could to make sure that they were working perfectly to impress the important people of Glastonbury 😉 

[infinitywaiter]

It is funny too you mention about EE being worse than Vodafone, as ironically in 2022 a lot of people were saying that Vodafone were rubbish when EE was still the Official Partner.

So, one network isn't always the best of the best here, just because Vodafone has paid a lot more than EE were willing to, it doesn't always make them the best to use.

You would expect usage to go up each year too, yet in 2022 EE said...

EE data reveals that sun-soaked Festival goers used over 182 terabytes of data, a 76% increase in data used at Glastonbury 2019.

Yet in 2023 Vodafone claims to have beaten previous years with just 169tbs of data...

Vodafone, Glastonbury’s Official Connectivity Partner, has revealed that 169 terabytes of data was consumed by data-hungry Festival-goers – the most Vodafone data ever used at Glastonbury Festival and an incredible 99% more than 2022.

So it seems that even with Vodafone being the Official Partner in 2023, they still didn't have as much usage as EE, and I would have expected EE usage from 2022 would have risen dramatically, even without being the Official Partner in 2023.

Although not saying either is better though, honest!