Fleadh Cheoil na hÉireann
Wexford 2025
Ireland’s largest traditional music festival brought roughly 600,000 visitors to Wexford Town over the Fleadh weekend in August 2025 — a town with a resident population of about 23,000. NetworkUX surveyed every street of the town centre on the Saturday before, then again on Fleadh Saturday — the same routes, exactly one week apart. Speeds did fall on every measured network. But against a 26× surge in people on the ground, the networks held up remarkably well.
- Location
- Wexford Town (pop. ~23,000)
- Event Weekend Visitors
- ~600,000 (Fri–Sun)
- Networks Surveyed
- Vodafone · Eir · Three
- Measurements Captured
- 20,137 across both Saturdays
- Baseline
- Previous Saturday, same routes
Networks under 26× load. They bent — they didn’t break.
On a normal Saturday, all three operators delivered comfortably usable mobile data across Wexford Town. By Fleadh Saturday — the same streets, the same hours, but with the town hosting roughly twenty-six times its normal population — download and upload speeds had both fallen. Crucially, upload speeds took the bigger hit on every network: uploads are what authenticate logins, complete card payments, post the photo, and clear the spinning wheel. Even so, every operator stayed up, the majority of measurements were still in usable territory, and outright connection failures stayed below 6% across all three networks.
Downloads dipped. Uploads took the bigger hit.
Average download and upload speeds per operator, pre-Fleadh Saturday vs Fleadh Saturday. Upload speeds are the quieter half of any speed test, but they’re what completes a card transaction, posts a video, and clears the spinning wheel.
Vodafone’s download speed actually edged up slightly — but its upload dropped 44%. Eir’s upload took the steepest hit of any metric at 68% down. Upload throughput is the leading indicator of capacity stress, because uploads contend for the same scarce uplink resource that authenticates logins and completes payments — which is exactly what users feel as “the app is stuck”.
The shape of the network changed, but the floor held.
Each row shows the percentage of measurements that fell into each connection-quality band, classified by combined upload+download throughput. The “fast” tier shrank on every network, and a portion of measurements moved into the “slow” band. But the share of outright failed connections (under 1 Mbps or timed out) stayed below 6% everywhere — and a third to half of all measurements were still in the comfortable 5+ Mbps range under peak load.
The fast tier (15+ Mbps headroom) was effectively spent on the crowd — disappearing entirely on Eir and shrinking to a sliver on Three. That’s precisely what well-utilised capacity looks like under stress: headroom converts into served users, rather than the network falling over.
How the load landed, network by network.
Each pin is a single download measurement, colour-coded by speed. Green is fast, red is slow. The same survey routes, one week apart — with 600,000 visitors in between.
Vodafone
Steadiest performer of the weekend.
Eir
Felt the load hardest — stayed up.
Three
Lost the fast tier, kept the floor.
Wexford under 26× load still beat a normal day in London.
To put the Fleadh result in context, NetworkUX surveyed Liverpool Street Station, one of the UK’s busiest transport hubs, on a quiet Wednesday morning and a normal Thursday evening rush hour in April 2026. The Liverpool Street rush hour isn’t a special event — it’s a typical weekday peak. And it produced failure rates between 29% and 87% across the four UK networks.
Read the Liverpool Street case study → Read The Open Championship case study → Read the St Patrick’s Day Parade case study → Read the Tees Valley case study → Read the Westminster case study → Read the Manchester case study → Read the Ofcom rail case study →
Five takeaways for event planners, venues and operators.
The networks held under extreme load
A 26× surge in people over a single weekend is the kind of stress that knocks cellular networks over routinely at large UK and European events. In Wexford, all three operators stayed up, kept failed connections below 6%, and continued to serve the majority of measurements at comfortable speeds. That’s serious infrastructure performance, and it deserves to be recognised.
Uploads break before downloads do
The “average speed” figure can mask what users actually feel. Vodafone’s download even ticked up slightly between the two Saturdays — but its upload dropped 44%, and Eir’s upload dropped 68%. Uploads are what authenticate logins, complete payments and post photos. When uploads stall, the spinning wheel appears even though the download bar still shows a healthy reading.
Failures, not averages, signal real capacity stress
Pre-Fleadh, all three operators recorded zero failed measurements across the survey routes. During the Fleadh, failure rates climbed to 1.5% (Three), 3.4% (Vodafone) and 5.2% (Eir). The numbers are small, but the direction matters: any rise from a clean zero is the most reliable indicator that the network is genuinely working at its limits.
Capacity bends gracefully — it doesn’t snap
Every network kept its signal up; what changed was throughput. The same streets that delivered double-digit speeds last Saturday delivered low single digits a week later because the cells were absorbing far more users, not because the radio went dark. Graceful degradation is the right kind of network behaviour under crowd load.
A baseline is what makes the case
Without the previous Saturday’s measurements, the “during” figures are just numbers. With a baseline, they become a defensible record — one councils, operators, venues and businesses can use to celebrate what worked, plan for next year, and make the case for further investment with confidence.
Get the data before the crowd arrives.
NetworkUX provides before, during and after mobile performance monitoring for events of any scale — from a single venue to a town-wide festival like the Fleadh.