Internship Report

VIApass — Palais des Festivals (Cannes)

Network Operations High-Density Wi-Fi & Segmentation Maps, Playbooks, Dashboards

Summary

This internship immersed me in **event network operations** at the **Palais des Festivals**. The objective: ensure stable connectivity for diverse audiences (exhibitors, staff, press, visitors) during peak traffic periods. I worked on **readability of floor plans**, the **actionability of dashboards**, and the **fluidity of incident management**.

Key Challenges: quick visibility into sensitive areas, reduction of alerting noise, field coordination ↔ supervision.

Key Contributions

Creation of **mapping templates**: unified legends, homogeneous naming, "public" version.
Proposal of an **"event view"**: synthesis + drill-down by priority zone.
**Intervention Playbooks**: 1) rapid diagnosis 2) escalation 3) synthetic post-mortem.
Improvement of **ticket quality** via a minimal form (who/what/where/when).

Skills Developed

Technical

Segmentation (VLAN), high-density Wi-Fi, QoS and traffic prioritization.
Reading truly useful monitoring indicators (RSSI, SNR, median throughput, availability).
Interoperability with audiovisual equipment (IP addressing, gateway/DNS checks, configuration control).

Methodology

Versioned documentation, distribution of non-sensitive public views.
Incident management: from ticket creation to post-mortem, capitalizing on lessons learned.
Construction of pre-opening checklists and ultra-short debriefs.

Transversal

Field communication ↔ NOC, simplification for non-technical users, coordination of stakeholders.
Organization under pressure and prioritization.

Tools & Stack (Generic)

Monitoring & dashboards (network indicators, alerting, summary views).
Ticketing (diagnosis workflow → escalation → resolution → post-mortem).
Hardware: distribution cases, switches (e.g., MikroTik), high-density APs, RJ45/fiber patching.
Field verification tools (VLAN detection, DHCP, throughput test), schematics.

Concrete Case (Anonymized)

Context: press zone saturated mid-event.

Symptom validation (low throughput, high latency) → rapid multi-point tests.
Map & monitoring check → identification of an undersized priority zone.
Action: distribution reinforcement + rebalancing, QoS control.
Result: restored user comfort and stability until closing.

Best Practices

Uniform maps and consistent naming → less ambiguity.
Alerts sorted by criticality + contextualized thresholds → focus on actionable items.
Complete tickets (who/what/where/when) → accelerated diagnosis.
Pre-opening checklists + short debriefs → continuous improvement.

Before / During

Area before opening to the public (setup phase) — Before opening: preparation, cabling, and critical checks.

MikroTik case for temporary event distribution — During the event: operational distribution, maintaining SLOs.

Some technical information may be anonymized (public IPs, SSIDs, identifiers).

Acknowledgements

Thank you to the **VIApass** team for the welcome and guidance, and to the teams at the **Palais des Festivals** for the field collaboration. This immersion gave me a concrete vision of network demands in an event environment and reinforced my desire to continue in this path.