Baseball – Page 8

SF Giants fans used 78.2 TB of Wi-Fi data at AT&T Park during 2015 season

December 2, 2015 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

The view from AT&T Park’s left field corner. Photo: Paul Kapustka, MSR

It didn’t end with a World Series championship but the 2015 season for the San Francisco Giants did see fans use 78.2 terabytes of Wi-Fi data during home games at AT&T Park, the most-ever at the venue, according to the Giants.

Bill Schlough, senior vice president and CIO for the Giants, sent over a bunch of wireless data statistics from the Giants’ season, and on both Wi-Fi and AT&T DAS usage, numbers were up significantly from the year before. In addition to the 78.2 TB of Wi-Fi data used during baseball games, Schlough said additional data used during preseason games, concerts and private parties (like the SEAT 2015 softball game!) probably added another 20+ TB to the total, putting the AT&T Park Wi-Fi usage for the year in the 100 TB range.

Anyone else out there with numbers that challenge for the total Wi-Fi season crown?

Here are some more precise measurements from the AT&T Park 2015 season, with comparisons to 2014 in parentheses:

— Average Wi-Fi Take-Rate: 34.8% (33.9% in 2014)

— Wi-Fi Traffic/Game: 966 GB (591 GB)

— AT&T DAS Traffic/Game: 264 GB (196 GB)

— Wi-Fi Traffic/Connection: +59% vs. 2014

— DAS Traffic/Connection: +35%

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Major League Baseball, San Francisco Giants, SEAT Conference, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, AT&T Park, DAS, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, San Francisco Giants, SEAT 2015, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi

Kansas City Royals score with jump in postseason stadium Wi-Fi and DAS traffic

November 12, 2015 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

Royals fans at Kauffman Stadium enjoying the postseason. Credit all photos: Kansas City Royals (click on any photo for a larger image)

If you need a reason to justify Wi-Fi network installs or improvements in your stadium, here’s an optimistic rationale: If your team makes it to the playoffs and the championship, you can expect a big surge in postseason wireless traffic.

That idea was proven again this fall by the Kansas City Royals, who racked up big postseason Wi-Fi and DAS traffic numbers at Kauffman Stadium during their march to the 2015 World Series championship, including a 3.066 terabyte night on the Wi-Fi network for Game 1 of the World Series. That’s a 1 TB jump from last season, when Kansas City saw 2+ TB of Wi-Fi traffic during Game 7 of the 2014 World Series.

According to numbers provided by Brian Himstedt, senior director of information systems for the Royals, the Kauffman Stadium Wi-Fi network saw an average of 1.9 TB of aggregate throughput for the eight home games Kansas City hosted in the playoffs.

Fans cheering the Royals at Kauffman Stadium

The average peak user count over those games was 11,850, with a high peak of 13,900 during Game 2 of the World Series. The stadium’s capacity for the postseason games, Himstedt said, was 40,500.

The postseason Wi-Fi traffic, Himstedt said, was approximately 34 percent upload and 66 percent download. During the regular season, the Kauffman Wi-Fi network had upload/download averages of 22 percent and 78 percent respectively, meaning that during the playoffs fans were probably more busy sharing information than obtaining it.

Overall, the postseason Wi-Fi numbers were much larger than the Royals’ regular-season stats, Himstedt said. Here are some of the regular-season stats during a summer that saw the network serve more than 180,500 unique clients on the Wi-Fi network:

— Average throughput per game: 625 GB
— High throughput, single game: 1.05 TB (Sept. 26)
— Average peak concurrent users per game: 5,150
— High peak concurrent users, single game: 7,500 (Opening Day, April 6)

The average attendance of Kauffman Stadium during the regular season was 33,900, Himstedt said.

Sprint DAS numbers also jump

And while the DAS at Kauffman Stadium is still awaiting full participation by all of the top wireless carriers, hometown favorite Sprint was active on the new system deployed by Advanced RF Technologies before the start of the season, and according to Sprint there were huge increases in DAS traffic compared to 2014.

Here are some DAS numbers from Sprint about the playoff traffic at Kauffman Stadium:

— Total tonnage for the 2015 eight game post-season was 2.6 terabytes

— Average tonnage per post-season game increased 4,000% in 2015 compared to 2014

— Sprint fans talked on their phones a total of 178,954 minutes in the post-season

— LTE connection rates for the 2015 post-season improved by approximately 40% compared to 2014

According to Sprint, the DAS supported all the frequencies used by Sprint devices, including the 1.9GHz, 2.5GHz and 800MHz bands.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Major League Baseball, Sprint, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, DAS, Kansas City Royals, Kauffman Stadium, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi stats left on the bench in RootMetrics’ baseball stadium network performance scores

October 22, 2015 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

The folks at RootMetrics have another network research project out, one that claims to determine the best wireless connectivity in all the U.S. Major League Baseball stadiums. However, the report doesn’t include Wi-Fi network performance in any of its scoring processes, and it doesn’t publicly reveal the limits of its network tests, which are based on just one day’s results from a handful of devices in each venue and do not include any results from Apple iOS devices.

According to the RootMetrics survey, Fenway Park in Boston ended up atop their results, with strong scores for all the four major U.S. wireless carriers, a list that includes AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile. But the caveat about those “scores” is that they are composite results devised by RootMetrics itself and not a direct reflection of numerical network performance.

At Fenway, for instance, RootMetrics’ own results show that T-Mobile’s median upload and download speeds are 3.0 Mbps and 3.5 Mbps, respectively, while Verizon’s are 20.7 Mbps and 13.0 Mbps. Yet RootMetrics gives T-Mobile a third place at Fenway with a 89.5 “Rootscore,” compared to Verizon’s winning mark of 97.9, meaning that in RootMetrics’ scoring system a network six times as fast is only 10 percent better.

While it’s not included in the scoring or ranking, the Wi-Fi network at Fenway as measured by RootMetrics delivered speeds of 23.1 Mbps down and 22.0 up, besting all the cellular networks in the stadium. In its blog post RootMetrics does not explain why it doesn’t include Wi-Fi networks in its network measurements or scoring, even though its testing does show Wi-Fi performance at individual stadiums. Over the past year, Major League Baseball led a $300 million effort to install Wi-Fi networks in all MLB parks.

Unlike its metro-area tests, where RootMetrics uses “millions of data points,” the baseball stadium tests were calculated using just one device from each carrier — and all are Android-based, since RootMetrics’ internal testing system doesn’t run on iOS devices. And while RootMetrics said that for its results each park was visited “at least once,” in going through all 29 stadium reports there was only a single visit date mentioned for each one. RootMetrics also did not visit Rogers Centre in Toronto, home of the American League’s Blue Jays.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Android, Apple, AT&T, Baseball, Boston Red Sox, DAS, iOS, iPhone, Major League Baseball, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, Apple, AT&T, DAS, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

Rangers fans lead postseason baseball DAS usage on AT&T networks

October 14, 2015 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

Fans at the Texas Rangers’ Globe Life Park in Arlington have so far topped the charts for cellular traffic totals on AT&T networks during baseball’s postseason, with an average of 992 gigabytes of data used in two games played.

Across all the series, DAS totals for postseason play showed big leaps in data use compared to regular-season totals, in one case almost six times as much. And while you can’t really compare apples to oranges it looks like DAS traffic for games this year might eclipse last year’s record wireless traffic totals at places like AT&T Park.

According to statistics provided by AT&T, game 3 of the divisional series between the Rangers and the Toronto Blue Jays saw 1,109 GB of data move across the AT&T DAS network at Globe Life Park, the highest single-game DAS total across all baseball venues this fall. Remember, stats mentioned here are ONLY AT&T customer traffic on AT&T networks in the stadiums mentioned. According to AT&T, the 992 GB average of the two games so far in Arlington are 51 percent higher than the average DAS use from the season’s opening series back in the spring.

Over in the National League, AT&T customers at Citi Field in New York used 617 GB of data during game 3, which AT&T said was an increase of 600 percent compared to average use during the Mets’ season-opening series. At games 1 and 2 in Dodgers Stadium, AT&T saw an average of 532 GB of data used per game, a 34 percent jump from the season-opening average in Chavez Ravine.

Game 3 in the Chicago Cubs vs. St. Louis Cardinals at Wrigley Field saw 500 GB of data used, a 120 percent jump compared to the season-opening series (which may be skewed since Wrigley was still undergoing construction at that point). For games 1 and 2 in Busch Stadium in St. Louis the AT&T networks saw an average of 586 GB per game, with 617 GB used during game 2.

For the Royals-Astros series, AT&T did not have any stats for games in Kansas City (perhaps because the Kauffman Stadium DAS is still being deployed) but for game 3 and 4 in Minute Maid Park in Houston AT&T saw an average of 237 GB per game.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, DAS, Los Angeles Dodgers, Major League Baseball, San Francisco Giants, Texas Rangers, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Chicago Cubs, Citi Field, DAS, Dodgers Stadium, Kansas City Royals, Kauffman Stadium, MLB, Mobile Sports Report, New York Mets, Texas Rangers, World Series

Stadium Tech Report: Los Angeles Dodgers hit it out of the park with Cisco, Aruba Wi-Fi

September 11, 2015 by Terry Sweeney 4 Comments

Dodgers Stadium, the SoCal baseball shrine. All photos: Terry Sweeney, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

Growing up in the Los Angeles suburb of Norwalk, Ralph Esquibel recalled playing outdoors while inside the Dodger game was on the radio. “I knew from the kinds of noises coming out of the house how the game was going,” he laughed. Esquibel, now vice president of IT for the Los Angeles Dodgers, may have wished for some similar indicators or guideposts as he began the wireless retrofitting of Major League Baseball’s third oldest stadium (after Boston’s Fenway Park and Chicago’s Wrigley Field) in early 2011.

Esquibel faced multiple challenges with Dodger Stadium. First, there was all that concrete to push signals through or around. There was the size of the Chavez Ravine venue and its far-flung parking lots, spanning more than 350 acres. The stadium also has few overhangs, a favorite place to attach Wi-Fi access points or distributed antenna system (DAS) gear. Then there’s Dodger Stadium’s capacity — 56,000 seats – the largest in the league and almost 30 percent larger than the average MLB stadium (42,790).

Esquibel’s biggest hurdle? ” Trying to achieve the network that we wanted but also maintain an appropriate budget for the solution,” he said. While Esquibel would not specify what the Dodgers spent, he did allow that it was “an 8-figure project.”

Coverage challenges in the best seats

Initially, the best seats in the house presented a coverage challenge; field and club level seats along the third- and first-base lines and the dugout lack any overhangs. So while phones in those sections could receive a short, directional beam sent from across the outfield, the upstream signal couldn’t get back to the AP across the field, said Esquibel.

Ralph Esquibel, VP of IT for the Dodgers, with the new Wi-Fi relief pitcher mobile.

“We wanted to guarantee a premium experience, regardless of the seat,” said Esquibel, who joined the Dodgers 6 years ago after working in IT at Toyota and Honda. So by using what he calls “a hybrid approach,” Wi-Fi APs and antennas are installed overhead where possible, but also under seats and in staircase handrails that divide the stadium’s steep aisles.

All told, nearly 1,000 APs from Cisco and Aruba Networks blanket Dodger stadium, its concession areas and parking lots. Horizon Communications helped the Dodgers with design and installation of the Wi-Fi and DAS.

The under-seat APs/Wi-Fi antennas on the club level are housed in NEMA enclosures about every 15 seats, set eight rows apart. Esquibel was concerned about losing real estate under those seats; he also didn’t want to create any potential trip hazard for fans. In addition, the Dodgers use Cat 6A cabling, whose thickness and rigidity couldn’t run up a stepped incline. Consequently, they drilled through concrete to snake the cabling through from the clubhouse underneath. “There’s no visible conduit leading into the enclosure,” Esquibel explained. The profile and footprint of the enclosure still leaves space for fans to place belongings.

Handrail Wi-Fi enclosure

It’s the same modus operandi for the enclosures housed in the stair rails, except there are two APs in larger enclosures at the top of each staircase on the reserve level and upper deck, then a single AP per enclosure as the stairways descend. Some 290 APs offer coverage on the reserve level, which by itself has a greater capacity than nearby Staples Center (18,118 seats), Esquibel told Mobile Sports Report. After 2 years of use, there have been no issues with the AP enclosures. “We power-wash the seats and stands after games and [the enclosures] are very resilient against the sun, water and wind,” Esquibel said.

He also acknowledged some early challenges with Wi-Fi. Part of the issue was working with Cisco’s CleanAir technology, which is supposed to minimize RF interference, if not eliminate it altogether. If an AP starts broadcasting over a frequency in use by another AP, for example, CleanAir helps it find another frequency. It took a few months to fully tune the network; some directional antennas needed a 10-degree adjustment, Esquibel said. Another challenge was having APs from more than one vendor. “If your network is 100 percent Cisco and all leveraging the same controllers, [CleanAir] will work perfectly,” Esquibel said. “If you have a mixed environment that pushes Wi-Fi in certain locations, it becomes a problem — there’s competition for frequencies.”

Coordinating the APs

A third-party leveraging a non-public frequency would switch channels, for example, causing the APs for public use to also switch channels. “What we had was a lot of bouncing back and forth,” Esquibel said, which affected performance. “So we assigned channels and frequencies for each AP, which still requires a lot of coordination.”

Under-seat Wi-Fi enclosure

Since 2013, the stadium has been carved into 24 DAS sectors. AT&T, T-Mobile USA and Verizon Wireless are the carriers presently using the DAS; Ericsson makes the DAS antennas. Stubborn Sprint relies on a tower adjacent to the stadium.

Dodger fans average anywhere from 500-655 megabytes of data use per game, according to Esquibel. During a busy game, the wireless networking accommodates 16,000 concurrent users; a slower event clocks in at 4,000-8,000. To test upload speed, Esquibel will push a 50MB video to Facebook. When there’s lots of available bandwidth, he gets 60 Mbps performance; on the low end, it’s closer to 4 Mbps. Esquibel said users are mostly streaming and posting videos and photos to social media; Dodger Stadium is the second most Instagrammed site in southern California, after Disneyland, Esquibel added.

The Dodgers have their own version of Ballpark, the in-stadium MLB app, which offers video replay and highlights; in-seat ordering of food and drink in certain areas; and stadium mapping. Check-ins on Ballpark are handled through a network of 44 iBeacons, which takes advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy (BTLE) technology. Between Ballpark and social media activity, Dodger fans have run up as much as 700 MB data usage during games — and the network is ready if more demand is needed.

“We don’t do any rate limiting, so if we consume all our bandwidth we get a free upgrade, thanks to a clause in our agreement with our ISP, AT&T,” Esquibel explained.

To ensure a family-friendly and wholesome environment, the Dodgers use Palo Alto Networks 5020 firewalls for content filtering. “As we developed our SLAs, it was one of the first issues to pop up — no sexual content, no malware/phishing, and no illegal drug sites,” he said.

What’s on his wish list for the future? “I’d like geo-fencing within the Wi-Fi network so if I see someone enter a club, I can say hi or welcome them, notify them of specials, or flag points of interest around the stadium,” Esquibel said, like the World Series trophy case or giveaway locations for promotional items. Alongside all the other applications, wireless can be used as guideposts for fans and visitors to Dodger Stadium.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Ericsson, Facebook, Los Angeles Dodgers, Major League Baseball, MSR Guides, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, Aruba Networks, AT&T, Cisco, DAS, Dodger Stadium, Horizon Communications, Los Angeles Dodgers, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Stadium Wi-Fi, Terry Sweeney, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

Chicago Cubs tap NFL deployment expertise of Extreme, DGP for new Wi-Fi, DAS at Wrigley Field

August 3, 2015 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

Artist rendering of the proposed fan plaza outside Wrigley Field. Renderings courtesy of the 1060 Project.

The video boards above the historic ivy-covered outfield walls are only the first clue that this isn’t your grandpa’s Wrigley Field anymore.

And though you won’t be able to see it, new Wi-Fi and DAS networks are coming soon to the Friendly Confines, as part of the Ricketts Family’s ambitious remake of Wrigley Field and its surrounding area. And according to Cubs IT executives, the team is tapping firms with NFL stadium expertise to bring not just fast and thorough wireless coverage to fans, but also back-end ownership and analytics so that the team can more effectively track online activity to improve the fan experience as well as improve the team’s return on infrastructure investment.

Though Wrigley Field has had full fan-facing Wi-Fi for longer than most Major League Baseball stadiums — the AT&T-built network arrived in 2012 — with the major overhaul of not just the park itself but the surrounding areas outside beginning this offseason, it was time to rethink the team’s overall approach to wireless connectivity, said Andrew McIntyre, senior director of information technology for the Chicago Cubs.

As part of the team’s ongoing 1060 Project the Ricketts family (which owns the Cubs) is not only adding more concessions and other fan amenities to Wrigley, they are also building a fan plaza outside the main gate as well as building a retail/office building and eventually a boutique hotel on the edge of the famed ballpark property at Chicago’s somewhat slanted corner of Clark and Addison. (If you don’t get the “1060” label, we suggest you ask Elwood Blues what the address of Wrigley Field is.)

“As it all starts looking more like a campus, it changes the dynamics” of how you provide wireless coverage to all areas, said McIntyre. As a regular attendee, speaker and steering council member of the SEAT Conference — the premier gathering of stadium technology professionals — McIntyre was well aware of all the new trends for large-venue Wi-Fi and DAS deployments, some of which were taking place in football stadiums across the country.

“We understood what was happening with other leagues in regards to Wi-Fi and DAS from what we saw at SEAT,” said McIntyre, in an interview at this summer’s SEAT Conference in San Francisco. “We started to evaluate those deployments and ideas as we were getting ready for our restoration.”

The Winners: Wi-Fi with a heavy side of analytics, and team-owned DAS

Cubs fans know how to enjoy a day at the park. Photo: Lisa Farrell, MSR

As major construction took place this past offseason, the Cubs de-activated the AT&T Wi-Fi network that had previously served fans inside the ballpark. Even though it doesn’t sound very old, McIntyre notes that many other stadiums around the country have had to completely overhaul Wi-Fi networks built just several years ago, due to the ever-increasing demand for more bandwidth and the rapid introduction of new phones and devices that fans are bringing to games.

“AT&T had previously controlled both the DAS and the Wi-Fi, and [to them] the Wi-Fi was kind of a ‘check the box thing,’ ” McIntyre said. “The scope [of the network] was just for Wrigley Field only. When we took down the Wi-Fi while we replaced the bleachers, we looked more toward the future.”

What McIntyre and the Cubs IT team saw was a future where Wi-Fi was used not only to provide connectivity, but to also provide a deep link between venue owners and operators and the digital activities of their visitors, through advanced analytics of Wi-Fi traffic. In the end the Cubs selected Wi-Fi provider Extreme Networks for the Wrigley project, in no small part due to Extreme’s experience in deploying Wi-Fi networks and Wi-Fi analytics inside numerous NFL stadiums.

“We saw patterns emerging in other leagues, and especially in the NFL, where the league and teams called out analytics,” said McIntyre. Extreme, which has a partnership deal with the NFL as its preferred provider of Wi-Fi analytics for its Purview software, has provided analytics help at recent Super Bowls in addition to being part of stadium Wi-Fi deployments for the New England Patriots, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Seattle Seahawks, among others.

“A lot of times talk about Wi-Fi is simply about coverage and capacity, and more, more, more,” McIntyre said. “The question of ‘what are you doing with the service’ becomes an afterthought.” McIntyre noted that in some cases, the NFL has deployed Extreme analytics on top of Wi-Fi infrastructure with gear from another manufacturer. “What they [Extreme] are able to provide [with analytics] is night and day compared to the competition,” McIntyre said.

Back of the iconic Wrigley bleachers, circa 2014. Photo: Paul Kapustka, MSR

John Brams, director of Sports and Entertainment at Extreme Networks, called the coming Wrigley Field network “a signature deployment.” Wrigley Field itself is expected to have Wi-Fi service in time for the 2016 season, McIntyre said.

DAS: Neutral host instead of carrier-led

On the DAS side of the wireless equation, McIntyre and the Cubs team were impressed with the cellular network deployment at the San Francisco 49ers’ new venue, Levi’s Stadium, a deployment done by the lesser-known firm DAS Group Professionals, or DGP. While many may have first heard of DGP for its Levi’s Stadium deployment, DGP does have other large-venue experience, having built previous cellular networks for airports and the San Francisco Bay area’s BART light-rail service.

At Levi’s Stadium, DGP worked with the Niners to build a neutral-host DAS deployment that is owned and controlled by the team, an emerging trend for stadium owners and operators who don’t want to simply concede control to wireless carriers. Under a neutral-host deployment the owner or operator of the DAS typically builds a non-carrier-specific antenna infrastructure, and then charges wireless carriers to connect their systems to the back end of that network.

At a prior SEAT event McIntyre said the Cubs team talked to the Niners about why they went with DGP, and liked what they heard.

“The venue-owned DAS solution was a business model we liked,” McIntyre said, “It perfectly aligns with our strategy of being closer to the fan base and not one step removed.”

Steve Dutto, president of DGP, said the Cubs contract “validates our work at Levi’s Stadium.” The new DAS, McIntyre said, should be fully functional by 2017.

Artist rendering of the home plate view after all construction done.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, DAS, Levi's Stadium, Major League Baseball, SEAT Conference, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, Andrew McIntyre, AT&T, bleachers, Chicago Cubs, DAS, DGP, Extreme Networks, Levi's Stadium, MLB, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Ricketts, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, Wrigley Field