Every hall, every booth, every scan lands.
A convention is a city of exhibitors built in three days across halls the size of airports, and the network never covers the floor the way the crowd does. Zeva runs inside your show app and turns attendees' and exhibitors' phones into the network, so lead capture, booth payments and wayfinding keep working wall to wall.
Written for show producers, expo operations leads and exhibitor services teams at trade shows, consumer shows and fan conventions.
- Covers halls, concourses and the expo floor
- Exhibitor lead capture and payments keep processing
- Nothing to install on the center's network
The numbers behind the pitch
- transactions per 15 minutes when the network fails
- 450 → 60
- Source: Fiserv, SumUp
- year-over-year data volume at one 2025 event, 172 TB in a single day
- +35%
- Source: Verizon
- of smartphones in use support BLE 5.0+, with 2× data rate and long-range modes
- 95%
- Source: Bluetooth SIG
What fails on the floor
Convention-center connectivity is sold per event and sized for average use. The floor is never average.
Lead capture that queues
Exhibitors paid for scans. When scans don't sync, the data arrives late or not at all, and so do the complaints.
Booth payments that stall
Point-of-sale shares the same saturated network as 40,000 phones. Sales slow at the busiest hour of the show.
Hall-to-hall dead zones
Wayfinding and schedule changes don't reach people walking between halls, where coverage is thinnest.
Signings and panels that overflow
Queues for autographs and panels form faster than you can message the people standing in them.
What exhibitors and attendees get
The busiest hall becomes the best-connected hall, and the data lands where it's supposed to.
Lead capture that lands
Phone-based scans route phone-to-phone to a gateway with backhaul and sync into your lead retrieval platform in real time.
Payments that keep processing
Booth point-of-sale and merch route over the mesh to your payments provider and settle exactly as they do today.
Wayfinding across every hall
Booth routing, schedule changes and queue hints reach attendees in the concourse, not just on the floor.
Queue and floor intelligence
See which halls, booths and lines are drawing crowds in real time, from the mesh itself.
How it runs on a show floor
Your show app, registration, lead retrieval and payments platforms stay in place. Zeva sits underneath them.
- 1
Integrate
Add the Zeva SDK to your show app and exhibitor app, or ship the white-label Zeva app alongside them. Attendees and exhibitors opt in when they install.
- 2
Place
Gateways sit at registration, exhibitor services and in each hall, on the wired drops you already order from the center.
- 3
Run
A show-day dashboard shows mesh health, hall density and throughput. Everything else behaves as it does today.
Where conventions use Zeva
- 01Exhibitor lead retrievalPhone-based scans sync through the mesh in real time.
- 02Booth payments and merchPoint-of-sale that keeps processing at the busiest hour.
- 03Hall-to-hall wayfindingRouting to the booth, the panel room and the exit that works in the concourse.
- 04Signing and panel queue alertsTell the line it's full, or that the room just opened, before it's a problem.
- 05Attendee FindGroups and meet-ups find each other across halls with no service.
- 06Sponsor messagingDelivery proof for every message sold on the show app.
Questions from conventions
The objections we hear most from teams like yours, answered plainly.
Run your next show on the crowd.
We're selecting 2026–27 conventions and trade shows for validated deployments. Share your floor plan and app platform; we'll map gateways per hall.