MSR Guides – Page 13

Stadium Tech Report: Niners President Marathe confident that Levi’s Stadium network, apps will deliver as promised

May 30, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 3 Comments

Niners president Paraag Marathe (center) at Intersport Activation Summit panel.

So, Paraag Marathe — will the network at Levi’s Stadium live up to its considerable pre-launch billing and be ready to go when the stadium opens later this year?

“It better work, since we’ve been talking about it,” said Marathe Friday, during a panel discussion at the Intersport Activation Summit presented by SportsBusiness Journal/Daily in San Francisco. “We better be right.”

Even though the short history of in-stadium networks suggests that any new endeavor be launched with words of caution, Marathe and the San Francisco 49ers are instead confident — very confident — that their new stadium will launch with a network second to none, and have game-changing services like food and beverage delivery to seats and on-demand instant replay that will redefine the game-day experience.

Paraag Marathe, president, San Francisco 49ers

In both his panel discussion at the Ritz-Carlton hotel and in an additional interview afterward, Marathe provided some additional details about plans the Niners have talked about previously for the technology features at the new stadium, which is located in Santa Clara, Calif., smack dab in the middle of Silicon Valley. Though Marathe said the stadium’s location — quite literally next door to several high-tech company campuses — made technology “part of the DNA,” he stressed Friday that the Niners are seeking to use technology to improve the fan experience, and not just to have cool stuff.

“It’s not technology for technology’s sake,” Marathe said. “It’s to enhance being at the game.”

But he did add that the stadium’s Wi-Fi network will be the base for much of the innovation.

Wi-Fi is ‘the master key’

An under-the-seat access point. Credit: Aruba Networks

The Wi-Fi network, which Marathe said “will absolutely be working” when the park opens, is “the master key that unlocks everything,” he said. Currently being built with Wi-Fi access point gear from Aruba Networks and back-end network equipment from Brocade Networks, the Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi network will also have twin 10-Gigabit broadband pipes provided by Comcast to provide what Marathe said will be throughput “30 times more than any other stadium.”

Marathe said the Wi-Fi network is being built with what he calls a “spider web” of access points, though neither the Niners nor Aruba have yet said just how many access points will be used to create the network. There will also be a neutral-host cellular DAS at the stadium, built by DAS Group Professionals (DGP). Already, DGP has signed up the “big four” carriers of AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and T-Mobile, to use the DAS at the stadium.

What will the networks be used for? Marathe outlined four main points of technology innovation during his talk, including high-definition, on-demand replays via the new Niners stadium app; in-seat delivery of food and beverages to every seat; way-finding features to perform tasks like locating friends, finding parking spots, and to tell which bathroom lines are shortest; and paperless tickets, based on RFID and near-field communication to fans’ devices. Of the four, the replay idea and the food-delivery service stand out as massive technical and industrial challenges.

Promised: Better replays than those on TV

If there is one promise that has many in the stadium technology industry shaking their heads, it’s Marathe’s pledge of Levi’s being able to deliver “better replays than what the coaches are seeing,” since team coaches only get to see replays provided by the network broadcasts. The Niners, Marathe said, will have “a massive [internal] production crew” working on the replay feature, since replays not only need to be picked out of the video stream, they also need to be coded to work over the Internet and to be delivered to handsets. Though Marathe admitted that the video quality may dip a bit below true HD if a lot of fans try to watch replays at once, he told the conference crowd that the Niners’ stadium app is going to deliver “HD, slo-mo [replays] within seconds after a big play.”

While other stadiums, like Barclays Center in the NBA, use technologies like Cisco’s StadiumVision Mobile to deliver separate “channels” of live video and replays, Marathe said the Niners’ app will allow fans to choose their own replays and when they want to watch them. “If you have a [replay] channel, you’re subject to whatever is on that channel,” Marathe said.

The food-delivery feature, Marathe said, is more than putting a menu in an app — “it’s an immense industrial engineering exercise,” he said, to figure out things like how many runners are needed and when and how food needs to be prepared. In addition to food delivery — an option he said will be available to every seat in the 68,500-seat stadium — the Niners will also have “express pickup” lanes for digitally placed orders at concession stands, an idea that Marathe said helps eliminate or significantly reduce two of the three things that make concession interactions a time-consuming act.

“There’s decision time, transaction time, and preparation time,” Marathe said. “If you can eliminate two of three variables, that’s a few more minutes fans have to watch the game.” Waiting until fans show up at a stand to prepare the food will help keep the order fresh, he added.

Wayfinding, paperless tickets and the 9-Nerds

If there’s one idea that’s already gotten a lot of press, it’s the plan to have wayfinding technology assist features like the one that will let fans know how long the bathroom lines are. Marathe said the idea was to make it simple — “red light, yellow light, green light” — to let fans know that if they have to go, it might be faster to try the bathroom one section over.

“We’re really just trying to be smart,” said Marathe. Other wayfinding apps might include a parking-spot locator, or a friend-finder feature.

The fourth area where Marathe wants Levi’s to innovate in is paperless ticketing, which he said wouldn’t be 100 percent this year but it will eventually get there. A future scenario described by Marathe might use RFID or near-field communications to let fans simply walk through a gate without having to show a ticket or even a bar code to be scanned. Some ski areas, like Aspen and Vail in Colorado, already use such technology to let skiers get on lifts without having to show anyone their RFID-equipped lift tickets.

“The idea is to have greeters who can actually greet you” when you walk in, and perhaps extend a personal offer for discount goods purchases or seat upgrades, Marathe said. “It’s a more human interaction,” fueled by technology.

Wi-Fi coach in the stands at Gillette Stadium. Credit: Extreme Networks

Finally, to help fans figure out how to use the new network and apps, Marathe confirmed plans previously reported by Mobile Sports Report to hire a crew of “network coaches” to roam the stands. According to Marathe the coaches will be called “9 Nerds” (say it quickly) and will likely be college students, dressed in what Marathe called “Poindexter outfits.” The Niners are looking to hire 150 such network helpers, which would be the largest such crew we’ve heard of in the stadium networking marketplace.

“They’ll stand out,” Marathe promised.

Lots of network use — and a team ready for its launch

With all the hype about the network, Marathe expects that Levi’s Stadium wireless usage will far eclipse that at other stadiums, where often far fewer than half of the fans in attendance actually ever use things like Wi-Fi or stadium apps.

“Forget 10 percent [fan network use], we’re going to see something higher,” Marathe said. Even people who don’t have digital devices, he said, will probably borrow one “just to bring it to Levi’s to test it out.”

When asked why his team was so confident — in an industry where under-promising seems to be a sensible way to go — Marathe said that both the Silicon Valley heritage and the greenfield nature of the building gives the Niners and Levi’s a technological edge.

“Five years ago, we put together a kind of think tank with VCs and design people, and thought about what would be useful [at a new stadium], well before we ever put a shovel in the ground,” Marathe said. And even though the Niners’ CTO left the team earlier this year, Marathe is confident that his crew of 25 engineers (which he said also still gets some consulting help from the departed CTO, Kunal Malik) will deliver the network and apps as promised.

Having advanced technology in the new stadium, Marathe said, “was our mandate — the DNA of the building is all these tech companies that are around us. It’s who we are.”

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, AT&T, Cisco, Comcast, DAS, MSR Guides, NFL, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: Aruba Networks, Brocade Networks, Cal, California, Cisco, Comcast, DAS, DAS Group Professionals, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, Paraag Marathe, San Francisco 49ers, Santa Clara, stadium apps, Stadium Wi-Fi, Stanford, Super Bowl 50, video replays, Wi-Fi

Stadium Tech Report: Upgrades keep San Francisco Giants and AT&T Park at front of stadium DAS and Wi-Fi league

May 29, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 4 Comments

Outside AT&T Park. All photos, Paul Kapustka, Mobile Sports Report. (Click on any photo for larger image)

What’s it like when the best-connected park in Major League Baseball loses its cellular mojo for a month? This winter the San Francisco Giants found out how fun it isn’t to revisit the days of “no signal,” when a DAS upgrade meant about 30 days of little to no connectivity inside AT&T Park.

“It was painful,” said Bill Schlough, senior vice president and chief information officer for the Giants, during a recent in-person interview at AT&T Park. Though no big sporting events took place during the Feburary-to-March overhaul of the main AT&T distributed antenna system (DAS) head end, Schlough said during that time many of the roughly 200 to 300 employees who work at AT&T Park every day were forced to find daylight to make a call, just like the bad old days before DAS.

“We never really knew how much we rely on DAS [for internal operations], but having it down really drove it home,” said Schlough. The good news on the DAS front was that once the upgrade was complete, the Giants had a lot more space in their previously cramped head-end headquarters. According to Schlough, the new back-end equipment for AT&T’s DAS operations takes up less than 50 percent of the previous gear footprint, room that is likely to be filled with gear from yet another carrier slated to join the AT&T neutral-host DAS later this season.

Painful, but worth it.

Second major upgrade in 5 years of DAS

Giants CIO Bill Schlough (left) talks with workers in the park’s main DAS head end facility.

If you’re not familiar with a neutral DAS like the one at AT&T Park, it’s an implementation where there is one set of antennas and internal wiring, and then a “head end” where each carrier puts its cellular-specific networking gear, equipment that identifies and authorizes callers and then connects those calls or messages to fiber links back out to the Internet and beyond. As the lead provider of DAS and as the namesake sponsor of the park it makes sense that AT&T has the biggest DAS requirement on site. Verizon, which has been on the AT&T Park DAS for two years now, actually houses most of its head end gear in a separate facility nearby, and links to the AT&T Park system via fiber.

Part of this year’s DAS renovations include a new room specifically being built for Sprint’s DAS equipment, a sort of re-arrange-the-house construction project that saw the ballpark wall off half its painting services workshop to make space for Sprint’s gear. During our visit we saw workers putting up the racks that will hold the Sprint head end gear, as thick fiber cables snaked in the doorway.

Additional carrier(s) would likely be placed in the same room as AT&T and Verizon, on floor space that used to hold AT&T racks before those were un-drilled from the concrete floor and new racks were installed during the February-March overhaul. According to Schlough, the DAS upgrade (which required minimal tweaks to the previously installed DAS antennas) was the second major rip-and-replace action in the 5 years the DAS has been live at AT&T Park.

DAS performance improves over time; Wi-Fi is good too

White box at bottom is one of the under-the-seat Wi-Fi access points at AT&T Park.

Though Wi-Fi services in stadiums gets a lot of technology headlines, in many big arenas the DAS is an equal workhorse, connecting people who either don’t know how to or prefer not to connect to Wi-Fi services. Through the first 18 games of the 2014 season, Schlough said AT&T Park was seeing average AT&T traffic loads on the DAS of 150 Megabytes on the download side (fans requesting data) and 50 MB on the upload side (fans sending data). Figures for the Wi-Fi network (which is free to all customers) for the same span of games was an average of 400 MB download, 200 MB upload per game.

Schlough said performance stats for the AT&T portion of the DAS have improved vastly since the distributed antenna system was first put in.

“Just four or five years ago, 97 percent [connection rate] was actually relatively respectable,” Schlough said. Now, Schlough said network connect rates regularly hover in the “four nines” region, with a recent report showing a success rate of 99.9925 percent of all calls or texts going through.

The Wi-Fi network at AT&T Park, the first in any major sporting arena and still among the world’s most expansive, has more than 1,200 access points, many of which are now located beneath the seats. According to Schlough this coming offseason will likely represent the final phase of a stadium-wide deployment effort for the new, under-seat access points, which are installed symmetrically under the seats that are out in the open air.

Giants senior VP and CIO Bill Schlough, at the office

Since AT&T Park doesn’t have many railings alongside the seats “in the bowl” or those in the upper decks, the under-the-seat APs were the only choice to extend Wi-Fi connectivity, he said. Though the box-like antennas do take away some under-seat storage area from approximately every 40th seat, Schlough said there haven’t been many complaints from fans about the gear.

What he has seen, however, are many compliments about the network services, especially from fellow professionals in the sports IT world.

“I get friends in the business who come here and send me texts with Speedtests attached, showing how great the Wi-Fi is,” said Schlough. My own ad hoc testing before our interview (albeit during non-game hours) showed speeds of greater than 40 Mbps for Wi-Fi just outside the park near McCovey Cove, and speeds of 25+ Mbps just outside the main gate. Schlough also showed us some of the new iBeacon antennas, which are being tested at MLB parks this summer to provide near-field communication marketing opportunities, like automatically checking fans in to the official At Bat app when they pass by a beacon. It’s just another way the best-connected park in baseball seeks to continue to improve the fan experience.

According to Schlough, the connectivity at AT&T Park doesn’t hurt when it comes to ticket sales.

“People do come here more frequently, I think, because they know there will be good connectivity,” said Schlough. “There’s no compromise. I do think that’s part of why we’re currently riding the third longest sellout streak in MLB history.”

MORE PHOTOS BELOW — CLICK ON IMAGES TO SEE LARGER VERSION

Can you find the iBeacon in the bowels of AT&T Park? It’s the small grey box to the left of the other antenna.

Sprint’s new DAS room at AT&T Park.

A close-up of the under-seat AP. Each AP requires holes drilled through concrete to provide wiring access. APs are weather-sealed, according to the Giants.

Bill Schlough’s “old phones” collection. How many of these can you identify?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Major League Baseball, MSR Guides, San Francisco Giants, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, At Bat 2014, AT&T, AT&T Park, DAS, Major League Baseball, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, San Francisco Giants, Sprint, Stadium Wi-Fi, under seat Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

Stadium Tech Report: Churchill Downs picks a winner with Mobilitie DAS

May 16, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 6 Comments

The iconic twin spires of Churchill Downs, home of the Kentucky Derby. Credit all photos: Churchill Downs

Move over, Super Bowls — there’s a new wireless-traffic event king on the U.S. sports landscape, and it’s one that’s been around longer than anything else. Thanks to a new distributed antenna system installed this year at historic Churchill Downs, fans at the recent Kentucky Derby were able to set single-event wireless traffic records, at a place where not too long ago getting a decent signal on your phone was a longshot at best.

According to Churchill Downs Racetrack general manager Ryan Jordan, up until last year cellular connectivity was a pain point at the historic facility, which opened in Louisville, Ky., in 1875. Though recently cellular providers tried to address the smartphone crunch by bringing in technology like COWs (cellular towers on wheels), the spread-out nature of the track and its architectural challenges made the COWs an unsatisfactory solution.

“The temporary COWs really couldn’t handle the traffic,” said Jordan in a recent phone interview. In post-race surveys, he said, the track heard complaints about connectivity, as did the cellular carriers.

“We heard it [the complaints] and the carriers heard it,” Jordan said. “But we never had a solution to handle the problem.”

In 2013, however, Churchill Downs enlisted infrastructure provider Mobilitie to deploy a neutral-host DAS to bring better cellular connectivity to the entire facility. While the deal was struck too close to last year’s race to allow for a full buildout, by this year’s 140th running of the “Run for the Roses,” a full-scale, 253-antenna DAS was in place to produce some winning results. According to AT&T, the Churchill Downs DAS carried event-record traffic over the Kentucky Derby and Kentucky Oaks weekend, with a total of 2 Terabytes of overall traffic and a peak hour of 180 Gigabytes of traffic, in the 60 minutes just before the Derby race on May 3.

Ryan Jordan, general manager, Churchill Downs

By comparison, during the most recent Super Bowl at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey, AT&T saw a peak hour of 119 GB of traffic before kickoff, and 624 GB of total traffic on game day. Of course, some of the specifics of the Kentucky Derby make the big numbers easier to understand, including the 160,000 fans on race day as well as the full day of attendance, which featured less than a half-hour total of actual horses running fast. It’s important to note that the Derby figures are for AT&T traffic only, and do not include any potential traffic from Verizon Wireless customers, whose carrier also used the Mobilitie DAS to improve reception at the track.

“Derby Day is 13 races, each about 2 minutes long,” Jordan said. “When you figure out that the gates open at 8 a.m. and the Derby doesn’t start until 6:30 p.m., that’s almost 12 hours [of fans in attendance] and only 26 minutes of action.”

In other words, there’s a lot of time for selfies and other Internet activity.

Bucket list pictures, and race handicapping

Like the Super Bowl and other big sports events, the Kentucky Derby is a “bucket list” type of happening, one made even more receptive thanks to the see-and-be-seen nature of the event.

“People spend a lot of time taking in the things that make [the Derby] special, like hats, fashions, and the singing of ‘My Old Kentucky Home,’ ” Jordan said. “It’s the kind of event where people take pictures and send them to their friends to show them what they’re missing.”

Jordan said that in addition to social media activities, many fans at the track used the new DAS connectivity to try to improve their betting odds, using the Internet to help them handicap the races. (Churchill Downs also has a small amount of public Wi-Fi available only in the main building, used mainly to support an on-site mobile betting application.)

In previous years, fans at the event might not have been able to perform all those wireless functions. If the decision to upgrade the communications was an easy one, the decision to go with a “neutral” third party partner like Mobilitie came from a desire to serve all wireless customers equally. Though wireless carriers like AT&T and Verizon can and do act as lead contractors for many DAS deployments, the negotiations to get each carrier what it wants in terms of antenna deployments and other technology needs can get complex in a hurry.

“We know how to put on a great event,” said Jordan of the Derby’s owners and operators. For communications, Jordan said, the track sought out a firm with an equal amount of smarts and reputation in their field.

“We wanted to find someone who was an expert in the conversations [with carriers],” Jordan said, “and to make sure our system could cover as many of our fans as possible.”

Old buildings a challenge for new technology

Among the challenges encountered by Mobilitie at Churchill Downs were some structures dating back to the 1890s, including the iconic twin spires structure, which Jordan said dates back to 1895.

“Some areas have a lot of concrete and steel, and then there are seating areas open to the outside with enclosed dining rooms behind them,” Jordan said. “There were a lot of things for Mobilitie to design around, and it wasn’t easy for them. But walking around the facility, you don’t see a lot of large antennas. Everything is pretty discreet. We’re very pleased with Mobilitie. It was a great win for us.”

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, Horse Racing, MSR Guides, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, California Chrome, Churchill Downs Racetrack, DAS, Horse Racing, Kentucky Derby, Louisville, mobile betting, Mobile Sports Report, Mobilitie, Paul Kapustka, Run for the Roses, stadium DAS, triple crown, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

Stadium Tech Report: Utah Jazz, Boingo Wireless bring DAS to Energy Solutions Arena

May 8, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 2 Comments

Energy Solutions Arena. Credit, all photos: Utah Jazz

With a big new video board added this year, the Energy Solutions Arena had taken a signficant step toward improving the experience for fans at Utah Jazz basketball games. But when those fans went to look at the small screens in their hands, they often experienced frustration.

“It’s really important to our fans to be able to text or post something to Facebook,” said Jamie Galileo, vice president for facilities at the Energy Solutions Arena in Salt Lake City, Utah. But without Wi-Fi or a modern distributed antenna system (DAS) in the building, sometimes fans were left disconnected.

“Even our employees were able to watch the [cellular] service degrade quite sharply during games,” Galileo said. Next year, that shouldn’t be a problem thanks to the new neutral-host DAS currently being installed at Energy Solutions Arena by Boingo Wireless. With the ability to support all major carriers and their new 4G LTE technology, the new DAS should significantly improve connectivity at Jazz games and other events inside the 19,911-seat arena.

DAS first, Wi-Fi maybe later

Opened in 1991 (known then as the Delta Center), the Jazz’s home is one of the few NBA arenas without advanced wireless connectivity. One of only six NBA arenas without fan-facing Wi-Fi, Energy Solutions Arena is still studying Wi-Fi deployment, Galileo said.

Jamie Galileo

Wi-Fi is still “something to look at,” Galileo said. “We want to first get past [installing] the DAS, and see what that does for the fan base.”

Through this past NBA season, fans at the arena had limited enhanced connectivity. According to Galileo, the building only had small DAS-style infrastructures for Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile customers, and an older system for AT&T customers that was installed prior to the 2002 Winter Olympics, when the arena was used for figure skating and short-track speed skating competition.

“There was some legacy DAS equipment [in the building],” Galileo said. “But you wouldn’t consider it a DAS by today’s technology.”

Neutral host was key

After what Galileo called an extensive RFP and review, Boingo Wireless was chosen for the DAS deployment, which is scheduled to be ready for the start of the next NBA season, beginning in the fall. According to Galileo, Boingo’s ability to be a neutral host was extremely attractive to Energy Solutions Arena.

“Neutral was the key word,” Galileo said. “We did not want to have every carrier have its own antennas. One set of antennas is much easier to blend in.”

Inside shot of Energy Solutions Arena, with big new video board

Doug Lodder, vice president of business development at Boingo Wireless, said Energy Solutions Arena has good cabling runs, which should make deployment of the DAS a fairly straightforward task.

“The bowl is always challenging,” said Lodder, who added that Energy Solutions Arena’s somewhat vertical shape of its main seating area might mean a little extra deployment work for Boingo engineers. And while no major carriers have yet signed deals to be on the DAS, Lodder is confident that most will want to have a presence in the building and will sign on before the Jazz start playing again.

“The demand is very high to be in a tier 1 NBA building,” Lodder said.

Galileo said that the arena has plenty of room for the DAS head end equipment, a space requirement that is sometimes challenging for older structures.

“We are on 3.5 acres of a 10-acre site,” Galileo said, “so we have some auxiliary areas. We won’t have to build out additional [head end] space.”

Between Jazz games and other events, Galileo said that Energy Solutions Arena typically has guests in the building 100 times a year. It is also a regular host to NCAA basketball tournaments, and Galileo said the new connectivity should help with future bids.

“It doesn’t hurt to have a DAS,” he said.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Basketball, DAS, MSR Guides, NBA, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Boingo Wireless, DAS, Energy Solutions Arena, Mobile Sports Report, NBA, Paul Kapustka, Salt Lake City, stadium DAS, Stadium Wi-Fi, Utah Jazz, Verizon Wireless

Stadium Tech Report: Boingo brings Wi-Fi, DAS to Air Force Academy stadiums

April 22, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 1 Comment

Falcon Stadium, Air Force Academy

Perched dramatically in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, the architectural gem known as Falcon Stadium is a great place to watch Air Force Academy football games. As a place to install a new wireless network, however, it’s not quite a beautiful site.

“It looks beautiful from the highway, but it’s not modern,” said Dermot “Derm” Coll, CEO of the Air Force Academy Athletic Corporation, in a recent phone interview. Though its many of its 46,692 seats offer soaring views across the field and across the plains and foothills just north of Colorado Springs, Coll said the stadium, which was built in 1962, was something of a black hole when it came to cellular or wireless communications.

Over the past few years as smartphones have become popular, Coll said fans were frustrated by their inability to make calls or connect to the Internet, and even staffers on site couldn’t communicate wirelessly. “Fans wanted to do what they do at home, so we saw a great need” for better connectivity, Coll said. And thanks to a new deal with Boingo Wireless, fans and cadets and any other visitors to Air Force Academy sports facilities will soon have both high-speed Wi-Fi and cellular DAS connectivity, which should make communications as pleasing as the mile-high views. In addition to Falcon Field, the deal also calls for Wi-Fi and DAS networks inside the AFA’s Cadet Field House, a cavernous 1960s-era building that hosts a basketball arena, a hockey arena and an indoor track.

Historic landmark status a challenge

Coll, who runs the organization that deals with all the business activities for Air Force athletics, said that signing the deal was the easy part of the long-planned installation. What proved tougher was bringing new wireless technology to facilities that were not only built in the ’60s, but also had historical landmark status.

“It was really challenging just to do things like run cable,” said Coll. “We had to be a little bit creative.”

Clune Arena, Air Force Academy

Doug Lodder, vice president of business development at Boingo Wireless, said installers had to hide some Wi-Fi antennas behind specially designed shielding that sported the Air Force Academy lightning-bolt logo, so as to blend in with Falcon Stadium’s distinctive architecture. “There were not a lot of places to hang stuff,” Lodder said.

For the 5,900-seat Clune Arena for basketball and the 2,500-seat Cadet Ice Arena, there were similar challenges. “The Fieldhouse is pretty old and dated, a real Cold War building,” Coll said. “It was not great for tech to prosper there.”

Yet to show how tech-savvy fans have become, Coll said that a small Wi-Fi network installed for internal use was seen by fans who were looking for SSIDs they could connect to.

“We got beat up because people could see the SSID and wanted access to the [internal] Wi-Fi,” Coll said. “So we knew fans had the desire to connect.”

Boingo’s airport rep helps land the deal

When it came to finding a provider for the DAS, Coll said the Academy wanted a neutral third-party host and Boingo fit that bill.

“Boingo gave us a great opportunity without having to go with one carrier over another,” Coll said. Though carrier hosts will often pledge that all their competitors will be welcome to join a carrier-built DAS, Coll didn’t want to have to worry about whether negotiations might keep one provider or another from joining the enhanced cellular network.

“You don’t want to [have to] hope your carrier is on the tower,” Coll said.

Boingo, which provides Wi-Fi service to Denver International Airport, was no stranger to Coll and the Academy.

Cadet Field House, Air Force Academy

“We knew their reputation, and they brought a lot to the table,” Coll said. The network at the Academy facilities will be free of charge, unlike some other Boingo public Wi-Fi deployments (such as at Chicago’s Soldier Field) where fans are charged a small amount for network access. The network inside Falcon Stadium is scheduled to be live in time for this year’s spring graduation ceremonies; Coll said the Academy is also looking into the possibility of having Boingo provide more wireless services to the rest of the campus, which is widely spread out through the hillsides just north of Colorado Springs.

Though the Academy has a game-day app, according to Coll you couldn’t really do much with it at the stadium because of the connectivity problems. In the near future, Coll said the idea is to bring more live info to the app, including updated stats and video replays.

“In the past you could sit in Falcon Stadium and launch the app, and not much would happen,” Coll said. “Now we’re looking forward to seeing it perform on game day.”

Filed Under: 4G LTE, DAS, MSR Guides, NCAA Football, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, Air Force Academy, Boingo Wireless, Cadet Fieldhouse, Clune Arena, DAS, Falcon Stadium, Falcon Stadium Wi-Fi, Mobile Sports Report, NCAA Football, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi

Stadium Tech Report: St. Louis’ Edward Jones Dome taps Mobilitie for DAS deployment

April 6, 2014 by Paul Kapustka 2 Comments

Edward Jones Dome

You can add the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis to the list of large, public facilities with a common No. 1 complaint from visitors: Why doesn’t my cell phone work?

“People get really anxious when they can’t get a signal,” said Marty Brooks, senior vice president and general manager of the Edward Jones Dome and the adjacent America’s Center convention complex. “It’s been our number one complaint, that people can’t connect.”

To address its connectivity issues, the team in charge of IT at the 66,000-seat stadium that is home to the NFL’s Rams and the adjacent 500,000-square-foot convention center enlisted wireless infrastructure supplier Mobilitie to install a neutral-host distributed antenna system (DAS), which should be operational this summer. At that point, cellular reception for customers of all the major carriers should improve drastically, even in the concrete hallways and closed meeting rooms of the connected facilities.

“Like many facilities that are 10 years old or older, we were not prepared for the [wireless] demands that the public and our clients have brought,” Brooks said in a recent phone interview. “It was a no-brainer for us to upgrade. We knew we had to.”

DAS first, another common theme

Marty Brooks, senior vice president and general manager, Edward Jones Dome

Aside from the connectivity issues, the deployment schedule Brooks and his team chose – DAS first – is also in line with many other facilities. Though Wi-Fi services often get more public attention due to the perhaps wider understanding of the technology, according to Mobile Sports Report’s 2013 State of the Stadium Technology Survey, most large public facilities that are installing new wireless infrastructure put a priority on DAS, perhaps because it alleivates the most pressing problem, that of having no connection at all.

“Our first priority was to address [basic] cellular, because we felt we could mobilize that deployment faster,” said Brooks. Though the facility, which opened in 1995, also hopes to bring Wi-Fi in, Brooks said the early negotiations confirms his beliefs that installing Wi-Fi is a longer process.

“We hope to get Wi-Fi installed in a couple years,” Brooks said. “But DAS will bring an immediate marked improvement.”

Staying in Neutral

Though the largest wireless carriers in the U.S., especially AT&T and Verizon Wireless, often like to lead or build DAS installations they are a part of, Brooks said that the St. Louis arena and convention center – which is owned by the St. Louis Regional Sports Authority and operated by the St. Louis Convention/Visitors Bureau – knew it wanted a third-party DAS operator.

“We felt the [DAS] backbone should be built like Switzerland,” said Brooks, who said that carrier groups were not even allowed to bid for the system’s construction. In the end the complex went with Mobilitie, a firm whose long track record of putting DAS into large public venues helped Brooks and his team move confidently forward.

Christos Karmis, president, Mobilitie

“Mobilitie has good relationships with all the carriers, and they had the experience we were looking for,” Brooks said.

“Our focus has always been to be a good partner with [wireless] carriers,” said Christos Karmis, president of Mobilitie, in a recent phone interview. One of the benefits a facility owner or operator gets when they work with a neutral provider like Mobilitie is the accumulated knowledge gained by doing many large-venue deployments, and the internal resources to have staff who knows the differences in needs between the major carriers.

“We have people who are 100 percent dedicated to each of the different carriers, and how their technology changes from year to year,” Karmis said. “You have to stay up to speed or even ahead of it. If not, you end up in a situation where [the DAS] is not deployed right and the carriers don’t move onto the system.”

Antennas easy, cabling hard

According to Brooks, the easy part of the DAS installation is the deployment of the actual antennas. The hard part, he said, is stringing all the cable necessary to bring signals to the antennas, especially in the “dark” areas like long concrete-walled hallways and the convention center’s many internal meeting rooms.

Edward Jones Dome at night

“Pulling all the wire is very difficult and time consuming,” Brooks said. “We need to make sure that the media members who are working back at the end of dark corridors, or the suite holders in the backs of their suites, all have the ability to connect with their cell phones. Same with the all the attendees in our convention halls. We need to bring [wireless] access to all the inner spaces of a steel and concrete building.”

For its DAS operations, the facility has a 1,700-square foot enclosure with all the necessary HVAC and electricity. Brooks said stadium owners and operators need to “be creative” in finding spaces for DAS gear, which has only grown larger the past few years with the 4G LTE network deployments from all the major carriers.

Planning for crowds beyond the game

Unlike other stadiums that exist by themselves, the combination of arena and convention center makes for some unusual crowd gatherings, Brooks said, including a half-dozen or so times a year when the 66,000-seat stadium is at capacity while another 25,000 to 30,000 people are at the convention center.

But just like they expect their team to win no matter who the opponent is, Brooks said Rams fans also expect their phones to work on game day – and they aren’t shy about letting his team know if their performance isn’t a winning one.

“There’s such a level of expectation for the service we have to provide – and the fans are not shy about letting us know,” Brooks said. “But we told them, we’re committed to making this happen.”

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, MSR Guides, NFL, Wi-Fi Tagged With: DAS, DAS in stadiums, Edward Jones Dome, Mobile Sports Report, Mobilitie, NFL, Paul Kapustka, St. Louis convention center, St. Louis Rams, stadium wireless