Vodafone partnered with a Glastonbury Festival drink vendor to demonstrate how network slicing can enable faster payment transactions

Vodafone partnered with EBC, an onsite drink vendor at the Glastonbury Festival — a music event in Somerset, U.K. — to demonstrate how network slicing can enable faster payment transactions. The carrier trialed this capability at three of EBC’s 10 beverage sites, which in total served 102 tills, each processing two transactions a minute during peak times.

5G network slicing is a feature of a cloud-native 5G network architecture in which a network “slice” is an isolated, bespoke end-to-end network, tailored to fulfill the requirements of a particular application. The isolated slice is protected from congestion, providing increased reliability and lower latency.

In EBC’s case, network slicing enabled real-time connectivity, speeding up the authorization of card payments. “Without real-time authentication of payments, it is estimated that 4% of revenues can be lost to fraudulent transactions,” claimed Vodafone in a press statement. And there is no doubt that the network at the festival was working overtime. According to the carrier, 200,000 poeple attended this year’s festival, generating 225 TB of data across its network — a year-on-year increase of 33%.

“Running some of the busiest bars at Glastonbury, it is so crucial that we have a stable data connection with the capacity to operate our tills. The Vodafone slice ensured that the three bars supported in the demonstration had that stable data connection and helped us serve our customers faster than ever before,” commented EBC’s Stock Manager Ryan Kingsley.

Vodafone has previously stated that it is using VMware Telco Cloud Platform for network slicing orchestration and automation. Standardizing on Telco Cloud Platform helps Vodafone scale services to meet burgeoning demand, the carrier’s CTO Johan Wibergh said at the time.