IDG News Service — When the annual Sundance Film Festival lands in Park City, Utah, the movers and shakers of Hollywood demand a lot more wireless capacity than the mountain town of 8,000 residents normally needs.

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The problem came to a head at last year's festival.

"There was just an insane number of iPhones up here," said Justin Simmons, associate director of IT for the nonprofit Sundance Institute, which puts on the festival.

Users of all types of smartphones ran into a wall when they tried to do something as simple as making a call or checking their e-mail. Even worse for Sundance, visitors often couldn't use the festival iPhone app they had bought for $4.99, which included data-hungry features such as movie trailers, Simmons said. Cellular data coverage, from all service providers, just wasn't cutting it. Simmons and his team didn't have to endure any tirades by spoiled movie stars, but complaints did come in from many people in the film industry and the media, he said.

So for the 2011 festival, Sundance will be expanding its free, public Wi-Fi network from the handful of locations offered in the past few years to 12 indoor and outdoor venues. Ruckus Wireless, a Wi-Fi specialist in Sunnyvale, California, donated equipment and services for the infrastructure.

The expanded network should offer a better visitor experience while also taking pressure off cellular networks that need to carry voice calls, Simmons said. Organizers think the free Wi-Fi will be necessary even though AT&T plans to triple the capacity of its network in the town and also bring in three "cell on wheels" trucks, he said.

With as many as 40,000 festival patrons expected to pack Park City during the two-week festival, Sundance had to build a network that could handle high density. Although Sundance celebrates independent film, it has become a place to premiere some of the biggest films of the coming year, and visitors pack into certain venues for highly anticipated screenings.

For example, at the Eccles Black Box, where attendees wait in line for screenings at the 1,100-seat Eccles Center theater, Sundance often sees 600 people gathered in a room the size of a high-school gymnasium, Simmons said. To serve that space, Ruckus is setting up three access points. But the company says just using three APs wouldn't be enough by itself, because signals from the APs would interfere with each other. The Ruckus gear uses dynamic beam-forming technology, which is designed to automatically find the best transmission path for each client and steer signals around interference, said David Callisch, vice president of marketing.

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