Over Labor Day weekend, 300 of the nation’s most talented student engineers gathered for DNHacks 2026, a selective hackathon presented by The David Network, to build real solutions across defense, energy, healthcare, and public systems. Before a single line of code could ship, the event needed one thing that is easy to take for granted and impossible to work without: power and internet that never blink. Prime AV built it.
The challenge: connectivity and power that cannot fail
A hackathon is one of the hardest environments to keep online. Hundreds of laptops, phones, and compute-heavy machines pull bandwidth at the same time, for two days straight, with no breaks. House WiFi collapses under that kind of load, and a single dropped connection or power hiccup can wipe out hours of work. The brief was simple to state and hard to deliver: keep every team online and powered from load in to final submission, with no interruptions.
High density event WiFi for hundreds of simultaneous users
Guest WiFi that works in an empty room falls apart the moment a crowd arrives. We deployed high density access points engineered for dense environments and tuned the network so hundreds of people could work at once with no dead zones and no slowdown at peak. Registration, real time collaboration, and every workstation ran on a network built to hold under pressure.
Redundant internet with dedicated fiber, Starlink, and 5G
A single internet line is a single point of failure. We brought dedicated fiber internet as the primary path, then configured Starlink and 5G as automatic failover. If any path dropped, traffic rerouted in seconds and the event stayed online. That is true internet redundancy, and it is the difference between a network people trust and one they worry about.
Two generators and redundant power for more than 400 devices
Connectivity is only as reliable as the power behind it. We deployed two generators delivering redundant power to more than 400 active devices, so access points, fiber switches, uplinks, and every machine on the floor stayed live through the entire event. Power and internet were engineered as one system, each backing the other up.
The result: terabytes moved, zero downtime
Across two days of nonstop, around the clock usage, our network moved terabytes of data and kept more than 400 devices online with zero downtime, zero dead zones, and zero dropped connections. The teams never had to think about the network, which is exactly the point.
When the mission cannot afford to lose power or connectivity for even a moment, the infrastructure has to disappear into the background and simply work.
Put reliable internet and power behind your event
Whether you are running a hackathon, a summit, a conference, or a large scale activation, Prime AV designs and deploys the redundant power and high density internet that keeps everything running. Explore our mobile internet and WiFi deployments, or pair connectivity with full event production and AV rentals for one accountable team.
Need bulletproof internet and power for your event?
Tell us your venue, headcount, and bandwidth needs and we will design a redundant plan that holds under real load.