Delivering Connectivity for 27,000+ Devices at Shopify Summit 2025

Background

Shopify Summit 2025 brought together 6,500 Shopify employees for a four-day internal event in Toronto, centered around innovation, hackathons, and team connection. Nearly 2,000 additional attendees joined across the street for Editions.dev, a separate but concurrently supported event for Shopify platform users. Despite being distinct experiences, both events shared the same underlying network infrastructure, supporting nearly 8,500 users across multiple buildings — all delivered through a unified, high-performance UniFi network deployment.

With thousands of developers and highly technical users relying on consistent, high-speed internet access for intensive coding, software deployment, video streaming, and real-time collaboration, the event required an exceptionally robust and expansive networking infrastructure. Rapid deployment, seamless management, and exceptional reliability of the network were particularly critical given the planned high network utilization and the 24-hour event schedule.

Why UniFi?

UniFi's wireless performance is unparalleled, providing the critical horsepower necessary for pushing bandwidth limits in extremely dense, high-demand environments. Given the modern hardware and intensive bandwidth demands of the developers in attendance, the wireless channel plan called for utilizing the entire available 5 GHz and 6 GHz spectrum. This demanding scenario meant that maximum capability from every access point was crucial. UniFi's advanced wireless technology delivered, ensuring maximum throughput and minimal latency for thousands of simultaneous, high-bandwidth users.

Scalability was a decisive factor in selecting UniFi. While initial plans projected fewer connections, this full-stack UniFi Network scaled to more than 27,000 connected devices at peak times during the event.

UniFi’s rapid deployment capability was critical, with over 1,200 devices—including 330 wireless access points and almost 1,000 switches—installed quickly and efficiently within a stringent five-day window. This agility ensured minimal disruption and seamless operations throughout the event buildout, all managed via a single on-site Cloud Key Enterprise.

UniFi’s Enterprise Migration Assistance Program was instrumental in the deployment’s success. Through the program, Ubiquiti connected Shopify with industry experts—like WLAN Pros for RF design. The program also provided end-to-end support, including pre-sales consultation, network design assistance, on-site deployment assistance, and NOC support throughout the event.

6 GHz for 6,500+ People

The wireless networking for Shopify Summit 2025 was expertly designed and executed by Wireless LAN Professionals (WLAN Pros), led by Ferney Muñoz and Keith Parsons—recognized experts in high-density Wi-Fi deployments. Leveraging UniFi’s advanced wireless technology and best-in-class practices, WLAN Pros delivered robust and reliable wireless connectivity, effectively handling the demands of thousands of simultaneous users.

AP Selection

UniFi’s Wi-Fi 7-capable E7 Campus access points, equipped with directional antennas, were strategically selected to meet the event's high-density wireless demands. These advanced access points provided focused coverage, ensuring robust signal strength even in challenging open spaces. The choice of directional antennas was instrumental in minimizing interference and maximizing channel efficiency.

The E7 Campus APs, deployed primarily on trusses and strategically placed tripods, effectively covered large, densely populated areas. Their directional design helped manage radio frequency utilization by reducing interference from neighboring APs, ensuring consistently high performance even under peak network demand conditions. The E7 Campuses were further aided by Ubiquiti’s patented PRISM technology on 5 GHz, further enhancing their ability to ignore adjacent channel interference and increase client throughput.

In breakout rooms throughout the venue, UniFi’s E7 access points were also deployed for traditional omnidirectional coverage.

Capacity Planning, RF Planning, and Design

Capacity planning involved meticulous RF modeling and extensive predictive simulations to accurately forecast and meet the substantial wireless demands of thousands of simultaneous connections. The RF planning and design process was comprehensive, leveraging advanced predictive modeling tools to visualize coverage patterns and identify potential areas of interference. To achieve this, WLAN Pros used Sidos for RF modeling and validation—a professional-grade platform that natively incorporates UniFi’s antenna patterns, ensuring highly accurate simulations and placement strategies. Initial site surveys and predictive models were validated and fine-tuned with rigorous on-site testing, using professional RF measurement tools and techniques.

This meticulous approach to RF planning helped identify ideal AP placements, optimal antenna angles, and power settings. Continuous monitoring with AirView within UniFi Network and proactive adjustments during the event ensured minimal channel congestion and maximum throughput, demonstrating UniFi’s superior capabilities in managing complex, high-density wireless environments.

The ability to rapidly modify configurations and redistribute resources allowed the UniFi solution to dynamically adapt to real-world conditions, maintaining consistent performance throughout the event. Initial projections accounted for significantly fewer devices, but the flexibility and robust capabilities of UniFi enabled seamless scaling to accommodate over 17,500 wireless clients.

Routing and Switching

Routing and switching infrastructure for Shopify Summit 2025 was designed and implemented by Shopify and Portable.Network, a division of Server North Inc. specializing in event and temporary network deployments. Facing a tight two-month design window and just five days for physical deployment, Portable.Network teamed with Shopify to execute a highly organized and efficient plan with UniFi, deploying nearly 1,000 switches and extensive fiber and copper infrastructure. The Shopify networking team worked together with Ubiquiti engineers and Portable.Network to qualify the network as each portion was brought online, including load testing. During the event, Shopify’s networking team ensured their users and resources were able to connect flawlessly across the venue, working in a NOC together with Portable.Network, Ubiquiti, and WLAN Pros.

Access Layer

To support wired connectivity for 4,000 seats, the team deployed 850 UniFi Flex 2.5G switches and Ultra switches. PoE pass-through support on the Ultra switches significantly simplified power and cabling requirements. This large-scale edge switch deployment resulted in approximately 7,000 Ethernet ports being provisioned in record time.

Distribution Layer

Pro Max 24 switches were installed across approximately 3 kilometers of trussing throughout the venue. Each switch on the truss was powered by strategically positioned UPS units, with copper cabling connecting them back to additional Pro Max switches located at floor level. These floor-level switches then leveraged extensive fiber backhauls to connect directly to the network core, delivering robust, high-speed interconnections at 10 Gbps or higher.

Core Switching and Routing

Three UniFi Aggregation Pro switches formed the network core, interlinked with 25-gigabit connections. These switches aggregated all distribution-layer connectivity and interfaced seamlessly with multiple UXG Enterprise routers. Due to cabling requirements, the core network had to handle both ProAV and Shopify user networking on the same switches. While ECS Aggregation would have been an ideal solution for this deployment, allowing for MC-LAG redundant connections, the ProAV requirement necessitated the use of Pro Aggregation.

The Portable.Network team engineered a custom solution utilizing MAC Address filtering with RADIUS authentication, enabling devices connecting to a single SSID to be dynamically distributed across multiple VLANs, each managed by one of eight UXG Enterprise gateways. Each gateway supported two 10-gigabit ISP connections, ensuring redundancy, reliability, and high availability.

ProAV Integration

UniFi’s ProAV capabilities effortlessly supported Dante audio, streaming ACN lighting for over 100 universes, and Bolero intercom systems simultaneously. UniFi’s ability to support high-bandwidth, latency-sensitive AV and multicast traffic on the same network switches, via the same GUI, is unique in the networking world. UniFi Protect was utilized with 28 cameras running on an Enterprise NVR, providing comprehensive venue surveillance accessible via Apple TVs throughout the venue, adding an extra layer of security and operational oversight.

Running the Event: Inside the NOC

Running an event of this magnitude requires meticulous coordination and agility. Shopify Summit's Network Operations Center (NOC) functioned as mission control, divided into specialized monitoring stations for wireless, routing and switching, RADIUS authentications, and overall user-experience support. The dedicated, focused environment of the NOC facilitated rapid identification and resolution of network issues, while a collaborative adjacent space allowed teams to strategize and triage more complex scenarios.

Rapid deployment inherently posed challenges, as thorough pre-event testing was not possible within the short setup window. Real-world conditions were the ultimate test, quickly surfacing minor deployment oversights and optimizations that mattered significantly at scale. Device counts far exceeded original estimates, highlighting the critical importance of adaptability.

One key challenge arose on the 5 GHz spectrum, where the sheer volume of client devices—about 30% more client devices than anticipated—led to throughput degradation due to physical spectrum limitations. Despite this, UniFi's tools empowered wireless engineers to quickly assess the situation using real-time monitoring features like AirView and make proactive adjustments, such as optimizing channel assignments, channel widths, power levels, and active bands per SSID. This ensured robust performance overall, with users on 6 GHz experiencing exceptional throughput, reinforcing that the future of high-density Wi-Fi lies in 6 GHz adoption.

Another complexity emerged on the switch routing side, where the unexpectedly high number of client devices pushed close to MAC address table limits on the Pro Aggregation core switches, chosen for their ProAV compatibility. Engineers from Shopify, Portable.Network, and Ubiquiti collaborated together, leveraging UniFi's intuitive management interface to implement targeted solutions, like VLAN optimizations and traffic redistribution, with minimal disruption.

Events of this scale are always dynamic , but UniFi equips skilled engineers with the right tools to adapt swiftly and maintain seamless operations. This deployment scaled to handle the surge in client devices, from edge to core capacity. We have learned valuable lessons about what types of alerts truly matter for engineers—cutting through the noise to focus on critical signals, such as MAC address table utilization or spectrum saturation. These insights are driving targeted optimizations across UniFi's hardware, software, AI, and monitoring capabilities, making the platform even more powerful, intelligent, and resilient for future deployments.

A deployment of this size, scale, and speed, especially given the narrow deployment window, would not have been possible without UniFi. When real-world issues inevitably occur; UniFi simplifies their resolution, empowering network engineers to quickly identify and resolve potential problems. For networks at this scale, resolving issues in minutes rather than hours can make the difference between seamless operation and a noticeable outage.

Conclusion

In the world of enterprise networking, a deployment with such high bandwidth requirements and such a short time to set up, is truly unique.Shopify Summit 2025 stands as a landmark achievement, proving UniFi's unmatched scalability in the face of extreme demands: over 27,000 devices, 17,500 wireless clients, and 150 TB of traffic handled with sub-millisecond latency to key services.

Going beyond hardware; UniFi empowered great engineers with the ultimate toolset to conquer real-world chaos. UniFi's rapid adaptability turned potential hurdles into triumphs, scaling far beyond initial plans while delivering rock-solid performance. As we implement lessons learned, from smarter alerting to enhancing automatic Wi-Fi channelization, UniFi is evolving to dominate even larger challenges.

For mission-critical events where failure isn't an option, UniFi doesn't just scale—it scales massively, reliably, and with the insights you need to make your deployment a success.