Connectivity requirements
| Connection | Requirement |
|---|---|
| Operator uplink | Wired connection recommended. About 1 Mbps up for audio-only; 5 Mbps up when sending the camera feed. A 4G/5G backup router is standard good practice and fully supported. |
| Firewall | Outbound only: TCP 443 (TLS) for pages and signalling, plus UDP media ports to the Interpretwise servers with automatic TCP fallback when UDP is blocked. Nothing inbound, no VPN, no on-site servers. |
| Audience | Roughly 0.15 Mbps per listener. 300 phones on venue Wi-Fi is about 45 Mbps of aggregate downstream; attendees on mobile data offload this entirely. |
| Venue network check | Included in the pre-event technical rehearsal: we verify the actual venue network end to end before the event day. |
What happens on a dropout
- Listener connection drops - The player reconnects automatically (network changes, Wi-Fi to 4G handovers, brief outages). While a stream is unavailable, listeners see a courtesy waiting state and audio resumes automatically.
- Operator connection drops - The console re-authenticates its session and re-establishes the feed; the event does not need to be recreated. With a wired uplink plus a 4G/5G backup, this is a seconds-long blip.
- Packet loss, not just outages - Audio streams carry forward error correction tuned for real-world networks, so imperfect Wi-Fi degrades gracefully instead of cutting out.
- Platform side - Production runs blue/green: new software versions come up alongside the old one, and deployments never interrupt a live event. Recordings run server-side.
Audio first by design
Interpreted audio and captions always have priority. In hybrid meeting rooms, video quality sheds first and can pause entirely under constrained bandwidth while audio continues uninterrupted; for large live events the audience stream is deliberately audio + captions only - which is what makes it so resilient on crowded venue networks.
Capacity
Audience capacity. Events comfortably serve hundreds of concurrent online listeners as standard. Tell us your expected audience size during the setup call and we provision and verify capacity for your event ahead of time.