02 June 2025
Industry-leading IT team relies on NetAlly’s diagnostic tools and Link-Live™ to ensure that mission-critical wired and wireless networks are bulletproof.
Overview
Pylon One is the industry leader in delivering innovative, robust communications services to major events and conferences around the globe. The company prides itself on having compelling and well-proven technical competence and unmatched expertise across its team of IT professionals.
When it comes to the design, installation, and support of enterprise-grade, mission-critical wired and wireless network infrastructures for major cultural, commercial, and historical events around the world, Pylon One is considered the best.
Challenges
When global corporations like Google, Intel, Facebook, or government agencies need to host complex live events, temporary wired and wireless network connectivity is essential to the success or failure of the attendee experience. As the world leader in designing, installing, and supporting the enterprise-grade, mission-critical network infrastructures behind significant global events, Pylon One knows 100% uptime is a business imperative.
When hundreds or even hundreds of thousands of people are accessing the network, outages are simply unacceptable. Whether its connecting tens of thousands of visitors in Austin, Texas attending the South by Southwest music festival, hundreds of shareholders at an annual meeting voting on phones or tablets, twenty thousand attendees watching a keynote address, or hundreds of thousands of the British public and tourists from around the world celebrating a royal event, Pylon One is tasked with ensuring flawless network performance in the most technically challenging environments. This often involves troubleshooting connectivity issues for production teams, ticketing, lighting, sound, integrated communications and CCTV systems, as well as security systems.
Solution
With little to no margin for error, Pylon One’s IT team needs to conduct field diagnostics on the entire network environment – wired and wireless. This means relying on the highest-quality testing tools to execute health checks, availability, throughput, and monitor responsiveness. These tools provide actionable information that identifies why a connection failed so they can go about quickly and efficiently correcting the problem.
Pylon One relies on NetAlly’s LinkRunner® 10G high-performance portable Ethernet tester for multi-gig copper and fiber networks. The AirCheck® G3 Pro wireless tester’s purpose-built hardware is used for wireless analysis and site surveys of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth/BLE networks. Site surveys are made easier with the device’s AirMapper™ Site Survey app. NetAlly’s Link-Live cloud- based reporting and analysis platform allows Pylon One teams to collaborate efficiently and share network status with key experts to improve field results.
“At Pylon One, we have a very specific set of testing requirements,” explained Mike Lang, Director of Sales and Marketing for Pylon One. “The tools we rely on must be highly responsive, highly accurate, and deliver results in real time. We have come to rely on NetAlly’s testing tools because they are the highest quality in the industry, bar none.”
AirCheck G3 Wireless Tester
The Pylon One team often uses the NetAlly tools in conjunction with other network tools. “We can send our people out into the field to gather site measurements using the Air Mapper feature and then import the data it into Hamina Network Planner,” stated Will Jones, Senior Technical Consultant for Pylon One. “Having real-world measurements imported into our design software enables us to easily validate our networks. This is a real force multiplier for us,” says Jones.
AirMapper Site Survey in Link-Live provides fast visualization of the Wi-Fi environment to validate coverage and performance or quickly find deficient areas.
Jones went on to explain that the NetAlly Link-Live cloud-based platform has been invaluable for ensuring that the expertise of Pylon One’s team can be leveraged across a broad set of events. He cited the example of supporting colleagues at a half a dozen different events in San Francisco – all with different requirements - through Link-Live’s capabilities, which enabled him to gain visibility into the RF environment at each event. Results from the LinkRunner showed the physical infrastructure from a cabling perspective, while the AirCheck G3 provided actional information on the performance of network services like DHCP or DNS so the team could quickly triage issues.
Results
For Pylon One, ensuring connectivity is mission critical. Outages that last even mere minutes are unacceptable. According to Lang, “When we are live on an event, we must deliver 100% uptime. That means we have to be able to work quickly to solve any problems and come up with creative solutions. NetAlly testing tools give us the visibility we need to be responsive.”
In one recent example, Jones shared that he was setting up in a conferencing center at a hotel where there were three wall jacks, one of which he needed to patch in to. Only two had labels on them. He didn’t have time to mess around trying to figure out if the jacks were functioning, so he immediately connected the LinkRunner, which told him the port’s connection had bad cabling. Jones was able to quickly and easily find a working jack using the NetAlly testing tool.
“The AirCheck G3 is indispensable to my work because it lets me easily capture packets,” explained Jones. “At the end of the day, packet data doesn’t lie. If I'm looking for unusual behavior, the packets are essential. And when I’m in the field, the G3 is a very simple yet powerful tool to use. Trying to capture packets on a laptop requires the right adapter and a monitor node. On the Wi-Fi side of things, a protocol analyzer can quickly flag obvious problems. When it comes to gathering intelligence quickly so I can crunch and analyze it, NetAlly tools are crucial. They save a huge amount of time.”
Jones professed a strong preference for NetAlly products. “At Pylon One, we are long-term users of these products,” stated Jones. “One of the reasons we've always stuck with NetAlly is because they are the best in the industry. We constantly evaluate other solutions and have found no one else has features that can match. Frankly, their competitors’ products just don’t work as well. At the end of the day, they get the job done and make my life easier on-site.”
Jones added that simply having a NetAlly tool in your hand gives you instant credibility – people know Pylon One means business. Lang shared that a passerby at a recent event spotted the NetAlly equipment being used by the Pylon One team and, on that basis alone, recommended the company for a significant quadrennial international multi-sport event.
For a company like Pylon One, your reputation is built not on how things go when everything runs smoothly but on how quickly you can respond to problems and go the extra mile to resolve them before they impact the end- user experience. Pylon One has long relied on NetAlly tools to stay at the top of their game.
