Gigs / Events WLAN Conundrum

[arty]

I often run tech for artists at various gigs, usually in the small to medium range (anything from pubs up to small theatres normally), and as part of my set-up, I have a network-based sound and lighting rig. I use an iPad to control this remotely via a little GLinet router running a 5Ghz WLAN.

Now this all works great, but one feature of the digital mixing desk I'm using is that it's possible to allow performers access to their own monitor mixes using (for example) their mobile phones. For example, if the lead singer wants to hear more of themselves through their floor monitor, they can open a particular app on their phone, and adjust their own level in their monitor without affecting anyone else (or pestering the sound guy!).

Here's the thing: this relies on their mobile phone being connected to the WLAN I'm running. However, this WLAN has no internet access, because it's simply not needed, and I have found that when either my mobile phone or those of performers I work with connect to that network, they lose connectivity to the internet, which means email, Facebook, WhatsApp etc. all stop working for them.

I don't want to set up any kind of internet access on this WLAN for security, cost and complexity reasons, so I was wondering whether there was a way to get people's own devices to use the WLAN for a specific range of IP address (e.g. a 192.168.0.0/24 subnet) while routing everything else to the normal cellular connection, without faffing about and reconfiguring their devices?

I think I've used this kind of set-up before with VPNs, and I recall it being described as a 'split route' / 'split DNS', but I'm not sure whether that's the right term.

Any ideas?

 

[Caged]

Mobile devices are generally quite stupid and want to keep things as simple as possible for people to use. You might be able to get close by enabling "Wi-Fi assist" or a similarly named feature which is designed to use mobile data if the Wi-Fi isn't working, but there's no real hard and fast rule as to how this stuff should behave.

 

[Glanza]

Why not give them a phone purely with the app on for them to use whilst performing and give that back to you once they are done?

Surely quicker than having them go off and get a app to put on their own device and won't interfere with their own phone internet access.

 

[arty]

Why not give them a phone purely with the app on for them to use whilst performing and give that back to you once they are done?

Surely quicker than having them go off and get a app to put on their own device and won't interfere with their own phone internet access.

That would require my carrying around multiple extra devices to hand out to people - probably 3-4 for the average gig - which I'm not keen to do on this small scale.

I tend to work with the same artists repeatedly so the one-off app install isn't a problem. Furthermore, many of these digital mixer set-ups can be remote-controlled by just a few apps, so sometimes people already have them installed anyway

 

[Ev0]

When they are performing and have the need to do stuff with their own levels/monitor, do they need internet access for other things at that time?

Can they not just connect to that network when they need to?

 

[arty]

In theory, yes, but in my experience iPhones at least try to connect proactively to known wireless networks all the time. I have to manually disconnect mine from the stage network at every gig (or disable Wifi) just to avoid this very problem.

 

[Steveocee]

A while ago I was tasked with creating a visitor experience using mobile devices but without using a purpose built mobile app. It was done via a WiFi ssid, the devices web browser and a multitude of proxy and vlan.
I too had this problem, devices would connect but then would mostly drop the WiFi connection as they realised there was no internet in the network, my solution was “let them eat cake” - a horrifically small amount of bandwidth, enough so the connectivity checks worked but nobody was going to sit there streaming.

I see 2 reasonable directions you can go here, either push all your app and control to the cloud and let their mobiles do mobile things to control them or you take on a £8 per month SIM card and stick a mobile connection in so devices will get internet.

 

[arty]

A while ago I was tasked with creating a visitor experience using mobile devices but without using a purpose built mobile app. It was done via a WiFi ssid, the devices web browser and a multitude of proxy and vlan.
I too had this problem, devices would connect but then would mostly drop the WiFi connection as they realised there was no internet in the network, my solution was “let them eat cake” - a horrifically small amount of bandwidth, enough so the connectivity checks worked but nobody was going to sit there streaming.

I see 2 reasonable directions you can go here, either push all your app and control to the cloud and let their mobiles do mobile things to control them or you take on a £8 per month SIM card and stick a mobile connection in so devices will get internet.

Interesting - maybe some sort of PAYG dongle would be the cheapest and simplest solution here. I might be able to look into bandwidth limiting WLAN clients on the router, too - it's quite a capable little thing

Your other idea of moving it all to the cloud is a fascinating one, and I can see ways of making that work in principle, but in practice unfortunately I think the latency would make it impractical. Part of the job of the mixer software is to monitor levels in real time with spectrum analysers etc., and anything over about 250ms latency on those makes them really difficult to interpret in a live band performance scenario. I'm already more or less at the limit just going locally at the moment. Still, perhaps a set-up where my 'master' iPad is connected locally but performers' devices connect via the internet could work, as sub-1s responsiveness is much less important for them. I'll have a think about this and how it might be set up.

Thanks a lot for your thoughts, really helpful.