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Wednesday Wi-Fi Whispers: Cisco Scores Big Wi-Fi (and Video!) Win at Nets’ Barclays Center

September 26, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The biggest vendor in the stadium Wi-Fi space scored a big win last week when Cisco announced it would supply the Wi-Fi network and the digital video services to the new Brooklyn Nets stadium, aka the Barclays Center.

Just after the announcement last week we caught up via phone with David Holland, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s Entertainment Solutions Group, and Stuart Hamilton, Cisco senior director for sports and entertainment, to get the skinny on the Barclays deal as well as their thoughts on how fast the stadium Wi-Fi movement was picking up. According to Hamilton, the pace of stadium Wi-Fi installs has picked up significantly since late last year, when Cisco seemed to be preaching to a sort-of interested choir.

Now, pretty much all stadium operators are singing the Wi-Fi tune. “They [stadium owners] have gone from ‘should we do it’ to ‘when are we going to do it,’ ” Hamilton said. “They all know they have to do it. And budgets are being moved up.”

After talking big about the stadium business earlier this year, Cisco has been somewhat quiet, without any real big wins — and even smaller victories, like getting the Wi-Fi network bid for the Super Bowl — were curiously understated, perhaps just part of the business since sometimes stadium owners or their telecom provider partners don’t want to talk too much about gear suppliers since giving praise means less leverage at the negotiating table.

Though the space is attracting a lot of innovative gear makers — Xirrus, Ruckus and Meru all come to mind — Holland thinks Cisco’s might gives it an edge, especially when it comes to scalability. “The me-too people out there, the question is, can they scale,” Holland asked. “We have a high density platform. It’s easy to look good when there’s only one person on your network, but how does it act when it’s heavily loaded?”

The Barclays Center is a big win for Cisco because it includes the StadiumVision feature, Cisco’s sports-specific implementation of networked digital signage. From the press release, here’s just part of what will be deployed:

700 HDTV’s and approximately 100 concession menu boards throughout the venue will provide content ranging from action on the court, to concession specials (all boards update simultaneously and are integrated with point of sale), to out-of-town games and scores, to traffic updates, and much more.

We’ve seen a live demonstration of this stuff (Cisco’s entertainment group has a building on Cisco campus that is set up like a stadium/sports bar, with HDTVs and concession menus to show the capability of the system) and it’s a big leap for the fan experience. And perhaps most importantly for Cisco the Barclays deal also includes a contract for the infrastructure network, the routers, switches and other gear that will power a network that will run not just the fan Wi-Fi service, but also help with wireless connectivity for ticketing, security, internal communications and more. That’s where Cisco makes its big dollars, so that combo makes the Barclays deal more than just a Wi-Fi install.

The bonus kicker from our conversation was a claim by the Cisco folks that they might not be out of the running for the new San Francisco 49ers Stadium, currently being built in Santa Clara. Though Niners CEO Jed York has tweeted about a pending technology deal with wireless provider Brocade, there might be several such contracts before all is said and done. First of all, the Brocade folks told us earlier in the summer that an official announcement was pending… but it hasn’t happened. And just this week the Niners announced a sponsorship deal with software vendor SAP, so it looks like there might be a bigger pie to divvy up when it comes to tech and the new Niners stadium.

Will Cisco get a slice? Stay tuned.

Filed Under: Cisco, NBA, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Great Barclays Center Inside Tech Look — From the Verge

September 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment

A great view of the technology behind the new Barclays Center, courtesy of the tech pub The Verge. It’s a little bit goofy and overproduced (why can’t tech reports about sports just report the news?) and a bit of a commercial (everything’s great before you actually test it) but a good look nonetheless.

Filed Under: Cisco, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , ,

Wednesday Wi-Fi Whispers: Olympic Road Race was a Missed Wi-Fi Opportunity

August 1, 2012 by Leave a Comment

We’re still scratching our heads here at Mobile Sports Report over the apparent lack of infrastructure planning that led to cellular congestion problems during last weekend’s Olympic men’s cycling road race. Our big, unanswered question: Why didn’t organizers put a temporary Wi-Fi network in place to handle the totally expected wireless traffic?

It can’t be a surprise anymore to anyone that people in general and sports fans in particular are going to be big users of mobile devices at events. Cycling races, especially loop-course races like the Olympics, are probably going to be at the top tier when it comes to mobile data usage since people typically sit in one place along the course to see the riders as they come by every lap — and then spend a lot of time waiting in between.

These days, that waiting is filled with mobile device use and it was a huge miss to not turn the Olympic race into some kind of Wi-Fi endeavor that could have benefitted multiple parties, including the fans. That organizers didn’t do something like install one of the mobile Wi-Fi networks our friends at Xirrus set up during the Tour de France seems to be a huge error, like Michael Phelps forgetting how to finish a butterfly race.

Why didn’t Cisco, which issued several press releases before the Olympics touting its role in helping with the IT infrastructure of the games, push to make the road race a commercial for its sports services? It’s not my marketing budget to spend, but I think Cisco could have done a really cool job by putting in a Wi-Fi network, having digital displays all around the course so that fans could see the action away from where they were sitting, and maybe have an app (like the cool Tour Tracker app) that people could download to stay abreast of the action on their phones and tablets.

Instead — we are left with a lot of finger-pointing, companies saying it wasn’t their problem, blah, blah, blah. The fact that a big crowd was going to be at the race and that it would want to use mobile devices wasn’t a last-minute secret. Big event organizers everywhere should learn from the Olympic failure and think ahead to see if there isn’t a Wi-Fi opportunity that can produce a positive outcome for all involved.

Ruckus Gets London Wi-Fi Gig

More Wi-Fi London news — the folks at Ruckus have won a contract to supply outdoor Wi-Fi antennas in London for operator Telefonika U.K.’s O2, which according to Light Reading have already been appearing on lampposts. Though it’s not a stadium win, it is another vote for Ruckus’ architecture.

Filed Under: Cisco, Olympics, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Olympics Wireless Network Gets Overloaded on Day 1: Organizers Ask Fans Not to Tweet

July 29, 2012 by 3 Comments

Well, despite lots of planning and press releases, it turns out that the folks behind the wireless networks at the London Olympics weren’t prepared for the smartphone revolution. According to a Reuters story today, fans effectively shut down TV coverage from the men’s cycling road race by overwhelming the wireless network with their communications, leading the games organizers to ask fans not to tweet so much.

(As Gizmodo says, good luck with that.)

Of course we here at Mobile Sports Report have been covering the whole Wi-Fi at events topic pretty closely, but from here it looks like we’re about to get a new failure data point, for what happens when big-event organizers underestimate the connectivity needs of the crowd. (Stay tuned this week for an in-depth report on the subject.)

According to the Reuters story, the men’s cycling road race Saturday didn’t get key broadcast information during the race because the hundreds of thousands of fans lining the course apparently gummed up the wireless network. Sunday, the games asked folks to back off on Twitter use:

An International Olympic Committee spokesman said the network problem had been caused by the messages sent by the hundreds of thousands of fans who lined the streets to cheer on the British team.

“Of course, if you want to send something, we are not going to say ‘Don’t, you can’t do it’, and we would certainly never prevent people,” he said. “It’s just – if it’s not an urgent, urgent one, please kind of take it easy.”

We are trying to get a response from networking gear vendor Cisco, which made much about its involvement with service provider BT, formerly known as British Telecom, the main service provider in and around London. While Cisco touted its networking chops before the games, like Michael Phelps the network’s performance so far is something short of gold.

Anyone over there in London have any downtime experiences? Let us know in the comments. More on this as we hear from Cisco.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Cisco, Olympics, Twitter, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Wednesday Wi-Fi Whispers: Niners-Brocade News, Coming Soon

July 18, 2012 by 1 Comment

Welcome to “Wednesday Wi-Fi Whispers,” our clever title for a new rumors and news snippets column debuting… right about now. The idea here is to keep this a bit more informal than our regular, solid news coverage, to give a home to those whispers of things we hear that might be happening in the world of stadium Wi-Fi. First up is the yet-to-come formal announcement of the stadium-technology partnership between the San Francisco 49ers and networking gear supplier Brocade.

Brocade and the Niners: It’s all about 802.11ac

When the Niners finally broke ground on their new stadium that is being built in Silicon Valley (Santa Clara, just north of San Jose) back in April, team president Jed York let loose with a tweet that all but announced which Silicon Valley company would get the prized stadium-technology deal. In a bit of a surprise, it wasn’t Cisco Systems, the 900-pound gorilla of networking, whose main corporate campus is seriously “just down the block” from the Niners’ new digs.

If you don’t know Brocade that just means you don’t follow networking technology. Having covered this company in my previous tech-writing lives I was surprised since I thought of Brocade as a core/backbone gear provider, and not a company that had products for things like Wi-Fi access. Silly me. With not a lot of digging I discovered that Brocade had signed a partnership with Motorola several years back and now in fact was heavily into Wi-Fi access points, the key technology in any stadium build.

And though Brocade hasn’t yet commented officially on the Niners deal — a formal press conference is apparently just around the corner — we did speak recently with David Hunt, a senior technical marketing engineer at Brocade, who said that among other innovations you can look to see Wi-Fi gear with the new 802.11ac protocol (which provides much higher throughput than current technology) when the Niners’ stadium is ready. Hunt said that Brocade is already assuming that data loads when the new stadium opens in 2014 will eclipse what is being used now, so look for all kinds of new gear and smart-networking designs to ensure that what will probably be the world’s most wired crowds will stay wirelessly connected.

Cisco, which has an entire building at its nearby HQ that is decked out like a sports bar (as part of its Connected Stadium marketing push) must be smarting a bit to have lost the Niners deal to its smaller neighbor Brocade, whose HQ is also just around the corner from the new site. But in the end Cisco will probably sign up a lot more stadium customers, since Brocade is likely to do the Niners’ arena as kind of a “see what we can do” deal rather than part of a big strategy to go after stadiums. Still, it’s not a bad place to showcase your stuff if you are trying to sell to enterprise technology buyers. Those people spend a lot of time — and money — in Silicon Valley already. Stay tuned to MSR for more when the formal announcement is made. The wait is probably not gonna be long.

Will Time Warner Cable surf from the beaches to the stadiums?

In a cool side-gig thing we did last week we got to hear about how Time Warner Cable has brought Wi-Fi to the beaches in Southern California — according to Rob Cerbone, VP of wireless product management at TWC, the beach Wi-Fi uses solar-powered ACs mounted on lifeguard stands to bring web surfing to the shore.

(By the way, I am shameless about seeing how many times I can milk that web surfing/real surfing line. Twice now, and I’m probably not done yet.)

As we cornered Cerbone after his panel talk we asked the obvious MSR question — if you could bring Wi-Fi to the beach, when can we expect to see TWC bringing Wi-Fi to stadiums? Seems like a natural fit, given the content TWC likes to send over its cables. The official word from Cerbone: No comment. But the body language seemed to say, you might hear something soon. Since TWC plans to have more than 10,000 wireless access points deployed in LA by the end of the year — should be interesting to see where some of them end up. There are a lot of beaches, but more malls… and stadiums.

SEAT Conference — who’s going?

Here’s a free plug for the SEAT 2012 conference, which takes place in Boston the first week of August. With this agenda it looks like a place for MSR and our industry leading stadium Wi-Fi coverage and analysis. We are working on finding a way to get there… if we can, we will see you there.

Is your stadium unwired? Let us know!

Now is the time on Sprockets when we dance. No! Now is the time on Wednesday Whispers when we profile a stadium that has Wi-Fi… but since this is the first time out there are no profiles and we are sad. Is your place “unwired?” Drop us a line and let us know. It could be the start of a grand tour… MSR visits the country’s unwired stadiums! Preferably, with a hot dog and beer in hand. Until next week… stay unwired, my friends.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Cisco, DAS, NFL, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: Too Many Penguin Texts? Free Wi-Fi for Intel.

June 1, 2012 by 2 Comments

Barry Bonds was interviewed last week and it seems that the former Pirates and Giants slugger is interested in taking a role in baseball. He met with Giants team executives about a role for himself with the squad.

Bonds has a personal service contract with the team that has apparently been inactive while he went through his trial and now that it’s behind him is looking for it to become active. I guess if Mark McGwire can return why not Bonds? I think sports reporters cringe at the idea.

The Patent Wars — A visual representation
The number of patent lawsuits seems to be increasing geometrically in the last few months as company after company either sues or countersues rivals. It has gotten so big that it is almost impossible to stay on top of all of the suits, lower and up court rulings along with alliances and patent sell-offs.

Now a site called Visual.ly has set it out in a graphic format that sets out the details much clearer. It shows who is selling patents to whom, and how many. It shows the back and forth suits between players such as Microsoft and Motorola. Head over and see if you can figure it out.

Technicolor seeks to enforce 40,000 patents
Remember Technicolor? You still occasionally see its logo on older movies, particularly many of the early classics that were filmed in color. Well the company has apparently been working to enforce a range of patents that it owns and its prime target appears to be mobile devices such as handhelds and smartphones.

The company said that the patents are in areas such as video, audio and optics and it has a team of 220 people that are dissecting products to see if and how they might violate its patents. The licensing division at the company represents a growing revenue and profit stream.

The Mariners erupt for lots of runs — and Twitter fans celebrate
I know from experience that it is always hard to stay positive about your favorite baseball team when they are playing poorly and it looks like it will be a very long season of poor play and lots of losses. The Mariner fans have seen their team flounder a bit but it certainly rose to the occasion when the Texas Rangers came to town this week.

Two high scoring games by the team, with one final score more closely resembling a football score had the teams’ fans sharing their enjoyment on Twitter. I do not follow the team on Twitter but was surprised to see the results when MLB pointed it out and directed users over to its Twitter Hub, a site I had previously missed. Interesting place.

Intel/Devicescape a Boon to Mobile Devices Owners with Intel Inside
Intel has reached a deal with a company called Devicescape that will enable users of ultrabooks and tablets that are using select Intel technology to gain free access to a network of 7 million public Wi-Fi spots. Using a feature called ‘enhanced connectivity’ that is in some Intel-powered devices a use can connect to Devicescape’s Curated Virtual Network (CVN).

The CVN has the ability to update a wide range of apps such as Facebook, email and Twitter on the device even if that device is in sleep mode. It even has the ability to log in to select networks that require that.

Cisco claims 2.5 web connections for each person on earth by 2016
In an annual survey conducted by Cisco Systems it predicted that by 2016 the number of Internet connections in the world would grow to 18.9 billion, a growth that is being driven by the demand and deployment of mobile devices.

The survey said that last year there was a mere 10.3 billion connections and that the biggest traffic growth would come from India, Brazil and South Africa. Sounds like a good time to be a networking company.

Pittsburgh Penguins abuse fan via Text
A fan is suing the Pittsburg Penguins hockey team over disregarding the terms of an agreement that he signed with the team and claims that it is sending him too many text messages. The agreement limits the team to three text messages a week and in the first week it sent 5 and the following week 4. He is seeking class action suit status and wants unspecified damages. The horror, the horror.

Twitter use slowly growing, survey says
The Pew Internet & American Life Project takes a look at Twitter use and finds that its adoption rate is stable and slowly growing, from 11% of US adults last May 2011 to 15% one year later. The study found that daily usage had increased to 8% of Internet users.

The biggest growth area, probably not too surprising, was in younger Internet users, in the 18-24 year old space, which tripled in the last year.

Google files antitrust complaint against Microsoft/Nokia
Google is claiming in an antitrust complaint that Microsoft and Windows phone ally Nokia use of patents has been done in such a way as to disrupt Google’s Android business. The complaint, filed with the European Commission, claims that the two plaintiffs, and others, are conspiring to enforce their patents in relation to smartphones and then splitting the resulting revenue.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Baseball, Cisco, Google, Lawsuit, Microsoft, Smartphone, Twitter Tagged With: , , , ,
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