Pokémon Go Fest attendees to get refunds as technical issues break the event

First off, they had everything in one place. For those who haven't played Ingress to that point, anomalies in Ingress usually take place with a primary and two secondary locations in, roughly, Asia, the Western Hemisphere, and Europe. This means that people aren't usually traveling from far away (which probably would increase overall participation) but also that each site's numbers are lower. I figure overall anomaly attendance on a given anomaly weekend might well rival that of this event -- but they're spread out in geography and time.

The second aspect is that Ingress has much more encouragement in-game of local organization. I understand quite well why Pokemon Go lacks in-game chat, but it saps local organization. Locals play an important, perhaps critical, role in Ingress event organization, and provide Niantic with free boots on the ground to figure things out. I know there is some local organization going on in Pokemon Go, but it's forced to be based on random encounters, and folks are still unsure whether to organize on team lines or just geographically. (With the current setup, I'd say geographically -- if there's anything to be learned from Ingress, it's to tamp down factionalism.)

The last thing, the one that I think would hurt Ingress equally? It seems there wasn't a limit on ticket sales. In Ingress some special extra-value packs that get you extra tchotchkes both virtual and physical exist, but the base 'free' ticket is unlimited. Similarly, here. They probably wanted to avoid any chance of scalping or the like, but imagine if they limited it to, say, a quarter the attendance?

No, I'd argue Niantic may originally have been engineering driven, but once Ruthless cut them from Alphabet, they went straight for the greed play, developed with an IP that would sell billions with next to no effort, and are now tightening the screws on the player-base with Pay-to-Win gym tickets and events requiring as many Lures and Incenses as you can buy to continue extracting income.

It was down for the entire game. A lot of hotspots popped up in the press area.

The during the actual All-Star game I tried the regular stadium Wifi. It was down for most of the game.

T-Mobile was up for most of the game, so I was still able to publish photos and read people's reactions. A good thing as T-Mo was the main sponsor for the games.

I asked earlier and have asked again whether anyone at the location but not officially attending is having better luck connecting, that would help to narrow it down between carrier issues, Niantic server issues and Niantic server-for-this-event issues

Edit: They expanded the area for special/regional spawns to 2 miles around Grant Park but still only for people who "checked in" at the park, and people who've left are reporting much better luck when they're away from the park. That may indicate that most of the issue was insufficient networking.

Cheap-ish providers are worse - they usually don't run fiber to every tower because laying fiber is expensive, but instead only to one tower which then distributes uplink via directional microwave to nearby towers. Once that link gets saturated or has issues, the whole area is screwed.

Providers like Deutsche Telekom (or other former monopolists) usually have it easier as they have huuuge amounts of fiber and especially conduits in the ground, which means it's easier for them to wire up even small towers with real dedicated fiber uplink.

Cell towers get saturated pretty easily by crowds. Network providers probably did not account for the crowd, or even if they did, it wasn't enough.

I would assume a company like Niantic asked network providers to install additional cell towers beforehand, so my best guess is they tried their best but still failed.

The technical details are quite complex, and you would need to read up on GSM,UMTS,LTE,TDMA,CDMA, but the bottom-line is, the overall technology isn't good enough yet.

Edit: Expanding on this a little while I still have time to edit, and all of this is from a non-telecom person so it's likely I have errors in here. Still, this should provide a starting point for the history and what to look for to get more current/accurate info.

Most 2G was GSM which used TDMA (Time Division) - basically, each device connecting to the tower was assigned a "slice" of the available time and had to broadcast within that time slice. When the tower ran out of slices, some devices simply couldn't connect to it. Sprint and Verizon were the exceptions, they used CDMA which allowed many devices to broadcast at the same time and was able to decode data for/from each device based on the Code Division used to encode it. CDMA towers "breathed" which meant that their coverage area could vary based on how many devices were connected because the devices and towers had to keep broadcasts within particular power levels at the endpoints. CDMA allowed more devices, TDMA could allow larger coverage from each tower by reducing the number of time slices (which also reduced the number of devices that could connect). Notably, CDMA allowed devices to talk to multiple towers at once with reconciliation being handled by a smarter backend, while TDMA required more explicit handoffs between towers. Way back when this was why on GSM your call would simply drop, but on CDMA you'd simply develop a severe case of robot voice.

3G almost all moved to WCDMA, which I believe had many of the same advantages in density as CDMA.

4G moved to somethind different (OFDMA?), which I haven't read enough about to really understand but which is technically quite different from WCDMA.

Most LTE uses yet another protocol. On T-Mobile, this was noticeable when T-Mo "refarmed" its network, converting a bunch of frequency bands from 4G to the newer higher-capacity but incompatible LTE. I know a few people who had 4G phones on T-Mobile and were offered free replacement phones because T-Mobile had basically yanked the actual 4G network out from under them.

Basically, there's a lot out there, it has changed a LOT over the last 10-15 years, and many of the changes were actually complete replacements rather than incremental upgrades.

What good are those towers if thousand people can connect but cannot use any internet because their backbone cable is so slow. I once was at a festival in Germany where they had such measures but lacked backbones (I had full signal strength in a remote array but the internet was unusable slow).

Not every town has fiber optic to support such a surge of people.

In fact, after playing for a bit, I turned off the AR because of loading times.