PRESS RELEASE
HACKENSACK, N.J. — Real-time intelligence at major events comes down to three things working together: 1. video that stays live under network congestion, 2. continuous location awareness, and 3. a shared operational picture. Getting there isn’t about acquiring more equipment but about having a depth of tools for whatever comes up during that event and testing connectivity under real crowd conditions. Building cross-agency video-sharing workflows before an incident helps align teams in preparation for major events.
For law enforcement commanding major public events such as a parade, a large protest, a championship celebration, or a stadium sporting event, the operational picture usually looks the same on paper. Officers are on the ground, supported by a command post, radios, and fixed cameras. The problem is that no two incidents are the same, and the picture of what’s going on may be incomplete.
Why crowded events strain traditional tools
Large crowds put enormous pressure on local cellular infrastructure. Consider Super Bowl LVIII in 2024: fans used 52.3 terabytes of data on a single carrier’s network in and around the stadium. Thousands of devices competing for the same towers can degrade connections that officers depend on: body-worn camera feeds, mobile data terminals, and voice communications. A response plan built around a single network path (one carrier, one connection type) becomes vulnerable exactly when incidents occur.
This isn’t theoretical. Michael Tobin, Emergency Management Coordinator for Charlotte-Mecklenburg, described it plainly to FirstNet: “Coverage is great until kick-off of a Carolina Panthers game when hundreds of fans are on the network.” Once fans start sending video and texts, first responders experience slow or dropped connectivity.
At the same time, the volume of information a command post needs to process has grown. Video from multiple vantage points, drone feeds, GPS locations, and radio traffic all need to be understood together, in real time, not reconstructed afterward from logs.
What “real-time intelligence” means in practice
For command staff, the term boils down to a number of operational capabilities:
• Seeing events as they happen: Reliable live video from the area of operation (AO) and continuous location data for personnel and assets, combined with information from CCTV, body-worn cameras, drones, sensors, social media, CAD, and field teams as events unfold
• Turning data into meaning: Raw feeds are correlated, verified, and analyzed to identify what matters, rather than simply creating more information
• Putting intelligence where decisions are made: The right information reaches commanders, officers, and decision-makers in the field, operations center, or executive team without unnecessary delay
• Creating a shared operating picture: Everyone works from the same current picture of what is happening, where it is happening, what is changing, and what may happen next
• Driving action, not observation: Real-time intelligence only has value if it shortens the gap between detection, understanding, decision, and response
None of this is new in concept. What has changed is the technology available to deliver it reliably.
The missing link to these capabilities is resilient infrastructure. Technologies like bonded connectivity (combining multiple cellular, WiFi, and satellite connections into a single resilient link) have made it more practical to keep a live feed up during exactly the kind of congestion large events produce. More recent approaches go further, using real-time network data to actively choose the best-performing connection moment to moment, rather than relying on a fixed setup that can’t adapt as conditions change.
Experienced field operators are quick to caution that no single tool or platform covers every scenario. Resilience comes less from any one piece of technology and more from having a broad enough toolkit, and the judgment to know which tool fits the moment. Every incident tends to demand its own combination of connectivity, hardware, and workflow, and agencies that build in that flexibility from the start are better positioned than those looking for a single fixed solution. That readiness isn’t something a team can improvise on the day of the event. It’s built through what experienced operators call “blue skies training”: rehearsing gear, workflows, and failure scenarios under calm conditions, long before a real incident puts them to the test.
Planning for events years out
Security planning for a major recurring event doesn’t start the year of the event. Agencies that have been through large-scale deployments generally point to the same lesson: connectivity and coordination strategy must be designed to scale across venues, agencies, and jurisdictions well before the operational planning phase begins. That means testing infrastructure under realistic congestion, establishing multi-agency video-sharing protocols in advance, and building procurement timelines around a resilience standard rather than a feature list.
Blue skies training is where that readiness gets built. Training a drone pilot to fly the aircraft, for instance, isn’t the same as training the whole chain: the aircraft, the connectivity, the live video, the command center, the field personnel, and the person ultimately making the call based on what they see. A workflow shouldn’t be tested end to end for the first time during the incident that matters. Technology only becomes operational capability once the people relying on it have practiced together, under realistic conditions, well before it counts.
Field teams also need the latitude to adapt in real time. Conditions on the ground can shift quickly during a live deployment, and by the time one issue is resolved, a new one has already surfaced. Rather than trying to engineer a solution for every contingency in advance, well-prepared teams focus on building the ability to pivot quickly, supported by a deep enough bench of tools and the training to use them on the fly.
Sturgis, South Dakota, offers a useful data point on what dedicated priority access can do under load. During the 2018 motorcycle rally, when a town of 7,000 hosts roughly 500,000 visitors, the region’s land mobile radio system typically saw a 2–4% busy-signal rate under congestion. With FirstNet’s priority and preemption in place, that rate dropped to 0.6%, according to South Dakota’s Statewide Interoperability Coordinator, Jeff Pierce (FirstNet.gov). Nothing else about the agency’s systems changed that year. Only the network priority did.
The same principles apply beyond sports. Midterm elections, hurricanes and other natural disasters, and civil unrest all create the same fundamental challenge: a compressed window in which command needs reliable video, location data, and cross-agency coordination, often in degraded network conditions. Planning for “the last event” is rarely enough preparation for the next one. As Kevin Cresswell, a security planner and former law enforcement and military commander, puts it: “Every operation has its own variables, its own risks and its own consequences. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. Public safety isn’t a formula. Every operation is different, and the response must be built around the reality on the ground, on the day.”
The planning implication
For agencies planning security for a major event, the practical questions worth asking early are less about hardware and more about resilience:
• What happens to our video and communications if the primary network gets overloaded?
• Can command see officer locations and camera feeds in one place, or are they split across separate systems?
• Is our current setup tested under actual crowd-congestion conditions, or only in normal ones?
As events grow larger and expectations around rapid, coordinated response grow with them, the agencies best positioned aren’t necessarily the ones with the most equipment. They’re the ones whose systems keep working, and keep talking to each other, when the network is under the most stress.
About LiveU
LiveU is a leading developer of live video broadcasting and streaming solutions that integrate with unmanned aerial and ground vehicles (UAVs/drones and UGVs). With over 5,000 customers in 150 countries, our technology is trusted by a wide variety of broadcasters, government departments, public safety agencies, and other organizations around the world.
Our state-of-the-art, high-reliability video products are based around our pioneering LRT™ (LiveU Reliable Transport) protocol and use unique IP bonding technology to enable live transmission from anywhere to anywhere over the public internet. LiveU’s LU-REQON1™, for example, combines up to six IP connections across cellular, Ethernet, WiFi, satellite, and mesh radio to create a single, robust and reliable connection using its LRT™ protocol. For more information, visit https://go.liveu.tv/l/788423/2026-08-25/38h9bm.