Extreme Networks to provide Wi-Fi 6 to 16 Major League Baseball stadiums

Extreme Wi-Fi gear (small white box in center) at Wrigley Field. Credit: Paul Kapustka, STR

In one of the biggest sports-venue Wi-Fi deals ever, Major League Baseball said it has selected Extreme Networks as its new “official Wi-Fi solutions provider,” a deal that will see Extreme Wi-Fi 6 gear being deployed in at least 16 MLB venues, beginning with the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park.

In an announcement today, Extreme and MLB said the deal would bring in-stadium Wi-Fi gear as well as Extreme’s network analytics software to at least 16 stadiums by 2026.

According to Major League Baseball, the Extreme deal represents the latest step for the league’s “technology consortium,” a plan started in 2014 where the league brought together a consortium of technology and service providers to more quickly bring better connectivity to MLB venues through pre-arranged and shared pricing structures. (In the first version of the consortium plan, Cisco was the preferred Wi-Fi gear supplier.)

Truman Boyes, MLB’s senior vice president for technology infrastructure, said that adding Wi-Fi 6 technology to the consortium offerings was driven by the continued increase in network data consumption by fans at ballparks.

“We’ve seen growth [in network usage] ramp up year after year,” Boyes said.

And while an earlier version of the Wi-Fi 6 rollout plan was set to start last spring, Boyes said that the Covid pandemic and its subsequent closing of almost all venues to fans in 2020 actually helped MLB solidify its plans.

More Extreme Wi-Fi gear underneath the roof at Wrigley Field. Credit: Paul Kapustka, STR

“We did have some delays [due to the pandemic] but because there still wasn’t an actual standardized approach to Wi-Fi 6 at this time last year, it became a good time to wait it out,” Boyes said. And after evaluating all the equipment providers in the Wi-Fi space, Boyes said Extreme’s experience in large-venue Wi-Fi networks helped make Extreme MLB’s choice based on technical merit.

“When it comes to networks of 20,000 to 40,000 [users], it’s a totally different landscape,” Boyes said. With Extreme’s experience in NFL-size venues, he said, “they know how to make it scale.”

According to Boyes, 10 of the network deployments are expected to be completed by the end of the year, with Fenway’s deployment scheduled to be live by opening day. (See full list at bottom of story)

MLB deal follows NFL deal

The “official” Wi-Fi deal adds another win to Extreme’s sports-industry ledger, following the company’s current similar deal with the NFL. Next year will be Extreme’s ninth season as the official Wi-Fi supplier to the NFL, where 12 of the 30 venues use Extreme gear exclusively for Wi-Fi. Extreme’s current deal with the NFL lasts until March of 2022, according to the NFL.

Like its NFL deal, Extreme’s contract with MLB does not require venues to use Extreme equipment; it simply provides teams with a league-approved deal that most likely has economics that are potentially more favorable than those available outside the consortium pricing, given that Extreme is both a supplier and a sponsor to the league.

“Teams can join if they want to share in the benefits of centralized management,” said Boyes of MLB’s consortium efforts. While 16 MLB teams have committed to the Wi-Fi 6 deal with Extreme, Boyes said there is “interest from other teams” as well. Currently, Boyes said 20 of MLB’s 30 teams have used consortium deals for connectivity in the past.

Extreme currently has two existing MLB customers for stadium Wi-Fi, the Chicago Cubs’ Wrigley Field and the Baltimore Orioles’ home, Oriole Park at Camden Yards. The Orioles’ deal with Extreme had not been previously reported, other than that Verizon had paid for Wi-Fi at the park.

While Extreme has gotten big visibility out of its NFL deal — one which allows Extreme to control the announcement of network-usage results from the Super Bowl each year, even if Extreme gear is not used at the venue — it has also not won any recent deals for new NFL Wi-Fi networks. The two newest NFL venues, SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, both chose Cisco as their Wi-Fi 6 gear supplier.

However, some long-standing Extreme customers in the NFL have recently stuck with Extreme for renovations, including updates at the last two Super Bowl venues, Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium and Tampa Bay’s Raymond James Stadium. Extreme and the Seattle Seahawks were also set to announce a Wi-Fi 6 upgrade to the network at Lumen Field this past year, but that announcement was delayed by the team due to the Covid pandemic.

Wes Durow, chief marketing officer for Extreme, said in a phone interview that Extreme’s focus on analytics makes it a great fit with Major League Baseball, which he said has been out in front of the entire sports world when it comes to emphasizing new statistics as a way to engage fans more closely.

And while acknowledging that a sponsorship with MLB was part of the equation, he said “that’s not what drove this deal. They [MLB] needeed to make a technology decision first.”

Consortium focusing on Wi-Fi

Unlike the past version of the consortium efforts, which included cellular distributed antenna network (DAS) systems as well as Wi-Fi, Boyes said the MLB consortium would “focus on Wi-Fi” going forward.

Part of MLB’s stance of “keeping DAS a little bit at arm’s length for now,” Boyes said, has to do with the complexity of 5G cellular deployments. Unlike 4G LTE cellular, where the top U.S. carriers all used similar spectrum spaces, the early 5G deployments from the top carriers all use different spectrum bands, which doesn’t work with a shared-antenna system.

MLB Stadiums that will get Extreme Wi-Fi 6:

Fenway Park (Boston Red Sox)
Chase Field (Arizona Diamondbacks)
Guaranteed Rate Field (Chicago White Sox)
Great American Ballpark (Cincinnati Reds)
Progressive Field (Cleveland Indians)
Comerica Park (Detroit Tigers)
Minute Maid Park (Houston Astros)
Kauffman Stadium (Kansas City Royals)
Marlins Park (Miami Marlins)
Citi Field (New York Mets)
Citizens Bank Park (Philadelphia Phillies)
PNC Park (Pittsburgh Pirates)
Petco Park (San Diego Padres)
T-Mobile Park (Seattle Mariners)
Busch Stadium (St. Louis Cardinals)
Nationals Park (Washington Nationals)

Super Bowl LV Wi-Fi: Low total, but per-fan usage remains steady

Fans at Super Bowl LV in Tampa used 13.97 TB of Wi-Fi data during the game. Credit: Preston Mack/Tampa Bay Buccaneers

Thanks to the reduced crowd size due to the Covid pandemic, the total Wi-Fi data used at Super Bowl LV was well below previous years’ numbers — but the data used per device was nearly equal to last year’s number, showing that fans are still using their devices at the “big game” with gusto.

Because of needs to socially distance, this year’s Super Bowl LV at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium only saw 24,835 fans in attendance, much lower than the sellout crowds usually seen at the NFL’s championship game. According to numbers compiled by Extreme Networks, fans who connected to the stadium’s Wi-Fi network used a total of 13.97 terabytes of data, far below last year’s total of 26.42 TB used at Super Bowl LIV at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, when 62,417 fans were at the game.

The fans watching Tampa Bay’s 31-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs live, however, used almost as much data per device as last year. According to Extreme 23,766 devices were seen on the stadium’s Wi-Fi network before and during the game. That works out to a per-user bandwidth usage rate of 587.8 MB per device, comparable to the 595.6 MB per user mark seen at last year’s big game.

Only 24,835 fans were in attendance at Super Bowl LV due to safety restrictions. Credit: Preston Mack/Tampa Bay Buccaneers

According to Extreme the 23,766 total-devices number includes 3,891 devices that connected to the network before the gates were open, utilizing an expanded Wi-Fi network in and around the stadium entry areas and the parking lots. Once the gates opened, Extreme said it saw 19,875 devices connect inside the venue, for an approximate “take rate” of 80 percent. At last year’s game Extreme saw a take rate of 71 percent, with 44,358 unique devices connected to the network.

Some more interesting nuggets from the Extreme numbers:
— Peak bandwidth usage was 7.9 Gbps, and peak concurrent users on the network was 12,288.
— The fans used 2.58 TB of Wi-Fi data before kickoff, and 11.39 TB afterwards.
— Top app used by fans was Facebook, accounting for 1.6 TB of all data used.

In part because of the pandemic safety measures, this was the first Super Bowl ever to go completely cashless for concessions and all-digital for ticketing. According to Extreme the company added some temporary Wi-Fi infrastructure to handle the increased needs for connectivity in areas like entry gates and other places outside the stadium.

Smaller crowd leads to smaller cellular numbers at Super Bowl LV

A MatSing antenna (white ball on right hand side of structure) hangs from the light tower at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Fla., during Super Bowl LV. Credit: MatSing

With limited attendance due to the Covid pandemic, the best bet on Super Bowl LV was that the fans’ wireless traffic usage totals — which in past history have only gone up every year — would be diminished from previous events.

And even as the carriers continue to report numbers with parameters that make them hard to analyze, the bottom line from Sunday’s big game — which had 24,835 fans in attendance — was a total of 17.7 terabytes combined for AT&T and Verizon (with no numbers reported by T-Mobile), about half the usage when compared to last year’s game.

Once again, it is impossible to compare apples to apples as Verizon’s reported total of 4G and 5G data used, 7 TB, is from Raymond James Stadium only. AT&T, meanwhile, reported 10.7 TB of 4G and 5G data used, but from an area “in and around the stadium,” with no exact description of how far out “around the stadium” meant.

Still, taken at the highest totals the traffic pales compared to that seen at the most recent Super Bowls, where cellular traffic reported was above 35 TB for AT&T and Verizon last year and somewhere north of 50 TB two years ago, when Sprint (now part of T-Mobile) also reported numbers.

Verizon, which did say that 56 percent of the attendees were Verizon customers (which if you use the official attendance as a starting point gives you 13,907 Verizon customers at the game), gave us a chance to do some bandwidth-per-user math. Our unofficial calculations show Verizon customers using an average of 503 megabytes per user, a fairly solid metric when compared to last year’s Super Bowl Wi-Fi per-user usage total, 595.6 MB per user. (Wi-Fi total usage for Super Bowl LV has not yet been reported.) According to Verizon, its 5G customers saw an average download speed of 817 Mbps, with peak speeds reaching “over 2 Gbps.”

AT&T, meanwhile, claimed that its average 5G customer download speed was 1.261 Gbps with a peak download speed of 1.71 Gbps. However, since AT&T didn’t give us any way to calculate approximately how many customers it had at the game, it’s hard to measure its speeds directly with Verizon’s since there is no way of comparing how many devices AT&T had to support. T-Mobile, which claimed before the game that it had done as much as anyone else to support its customers at the game with 5G services, does not report traffic statistics from big events.

Interesting parking-lot poles and MatSings for the field

As part of the connectivity expansion ahead of the Super Bowl, poles like the one seen here may have 4G LTE, 5G and Wi-Fi for outside-the-venue coverage. Credit: ConcealFab

A couple of interesting notes: We want to tell you a bit more about the parking-lot pole enclosures that the carriers (and the Wi-Fi providers) used to cover the areas outside the venue. The supplier, a company called ConcealFab from Colorado Springs, Colo., said the pole enclosures (see picture) were designed and manufactured in-house, and can support a heady mix of wireless gear in what we consider an attractive ensemble.

Though not every pole had every bit of equipment, according to ConcealFab the enclosures “conceal low & mid-band 4G radio equipment and has a pole top shroud that contains omnidirectional 4G and public WiFi signals. 5G radios are mounted with shrouds that have clearWave™ technology that has been tested and approved for mmW frequency.” The company said that some of the poles had lights and security cameras mounted atop them as well.

Inside, the poles were a veritable United Nations of supplier gear. According to ConcealFab, here’s which suppliers brought what to the table:
— Ericsson radios (mmW) inside modular shrouds
— CommScope radios (AWS, PCS, CBRS) in the base and along the pole body
— JMA canister antenna inside the pole top concealment
— Extreme Networks access points and Wi-Fi antenna inside the pole top concealment
— Leotek LED luminaires
— Axis cameras

We’d also like to note that MatSing Lens antennas once again played a role in providing cellular coverage, with a couple of the distinctive ball-shaped devices used at Raymond James Stadium to provide cellular coverage to the field. MatSing antennas, which have recently been installed at Allegiant Stadium and AT&T Stadium, have been part of the past four Super Bowls by our account.

Fewer fans a challenge for Super Bowl LV Wi-Fi

As part of the connectivity expansion ahead of the Super Bowl, poles like the one seen here may have 4G LTE, 5G and Wi-Fi for outside-the-venue coverage. Credit: ConcealFab

The diminished crowd size that will watch Super Bowl LV live Feb. 7 at Raymond James Stadium presents a unique challenge for the venue’s Wi-Fi network operators, who had to fine-tune a wireless deployment that is designed to support a full house.

“It’s all about optimization of RF [radio frequency],” said John Brams, senior director, venues, retail and logistics at Extreme Networks, the supplier of the gear behind the fan-facing Wi-Fi network in the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ home stadium. But instead of the expected sellout of approximately 70,000 spectators, Raymond James Stadium will only have somewhere between 22,000 and 25,000 people in attendance for Super Bowl LV, due to Covid-19 safety restrictions for social distancing.

When Extreme put a new Wi-Fi network into the venue a couple years ago, it installed approximately 1,400 Wi-Fi access points, including 950 in the seating bowl with most of those in under-seat enclosures. Like most under-seat deployments, the network at Raymond James Stadium was designed to use the bodies of fans — known in the RF industry as “waterbags” — to block wireless signals in a beneficial way, allowing network operators to place APs closer to each other without generating interference.

With fewer fans in the building, Extreme and the Raymond James Stadium IT team had to figure out just how to “tune” the network to balance connectivity with potential interference.

Limited attendance games provided a testing ground

While Brams said Extreme and the stadium had “five different scenarios” planned for various attendance levels, from empty to full, the last few home games during the Bucs’ regular season gave the network operators a good testing ground for the eventual Super Bowl plan. At the team’s last home game on Jan. 3, there were 16,009 fans in the stands, enough to give Extreme a way to test the eventual network operation plan for Super Bowl LV.

The limited crowd, Brams said, “gave us a broad sense of what we would have to work with” for Super Bowl LV. One benefit of the under-seat deployment is that by being under seats, the APs are less likely to cause interference with other APs, unlike top-down Wi-Fi deployments where signals are more out in the open.

But even as the game will assuredly fall short of the trend of previous Super Bowls — which set overall Wi-Fi usage records year after year — Brams said Extreme still added Wi-Fi capacity to other areas of the venue, especially areas just outside the stadium, to support connectivity for other Covid-related needs, like all-digital ticketing and cashless concession operations.

In total, the venue now has 1,522 APs ready for use at the Super Bowl, with 1,439 permanent placements and 83 temporary devices. Some of those APs were mounted on poles installed by Verizon to cover the parking lots, blending 4G LTE, 5G cellular and Wi-Fi to provide complete coverage for fans’ devices. According to Extreme, the Wi-Fi APs are all 802.11ac Wave 2 (Wi-Fi 5) devices.

Per-device usage still expected to be high

One number Brams still expects to grow is the metric Stadium Tech Report has highlighted the past few years — average bandwidth used per device. While the “big number” of total tonnage at large events is usually tied to overall capacity — making it hard to compare big-event Wi-Fi totals fairly — the average bandwidth per device metric seems to be the best way to measure a large venue’s network performance, since it hones in on what is most important — how well users can use the network.

“In some of the limited-crowd venue events [at Extreme venues] we’ve seen the per-device numbers continue to grow,” said Brams. Last year at Super Bowl LIV at Miami’s Hard Rock Stadium, an Extreme-powered Wi-Fi network saw a record per-device number of 595.6 megabytes per user, a jump of more than 100 mbps from Super Bowl LIII.

Verizon updates DAS, brings more 5G to Raymond James Stadium ahead of Super Bowl LV

Raymond James Stadium, the place where Super Bowl LV will take place on Feb. 7, 2021. Credit: Tampa Bay Buccaneers website

The limited number of fans being allowed to view Super Bowl LV live at Tampa’s Raymond James Stadium should have no problem finding wireless connectivity inside the venue, thanks in part to new deployments that include a renovated 4G LTE distributed antenna system (DAS) and 5G cellular infrastructure from Verizon.

Ordinarily, the Super Bowl would be the place where once again new records would be set for wireless data consumption, as fans at the “big game” would spend most of their time there posting updates on social media to let their less-fortunate friends know just how good a time they were having either cheering on their favorite team or just being a part of the nation’s yearly biggest single-day sporting event.

But in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic, Super Bowl LV will be a big game unlike any other, with only about 22,000 fans allowed in the stadium because of health concerns. But Verizon, as it usually does ahead of the Super Bowl, said it has spent somewhere north of $80 million to upgrade its systems in and around Raymond James Stadium and the greater downtown Tampa area, not necessarily for this year but also for the big events expected in the near future at a venue known for hosting big events like the college football playoff championships and Wrestlemania.

“This is all being built for the next Super Bowl, or when the WWE [Wrestlemania] comes to town,” said Brian Mecum, vice president for device technology and sports partnerships for Verizon, in a phone interview. For the reduced crowd fortunate enough to be at Super Bowl LV on Feb. 7, and for all the big crowds that will soon (we hope) be able to attend future events, Verizon has put in place a renovated DAS as well as a “robust” 5G millimeter wave deployment that will bring the next level of wireless connectivity to cellular customers across the board.

Verizon said it has also installed 281 small cell antennas to provide permanent extended cellular coverage around town, both in and around Raymond James Stadium as well as in downtown Tampa, the Tampa Riverwalk, and in nearby Ybor City.

All carriers are on the new DAS

While he would not reveal an exact count of the number of antennas or remotes in the new stadium DAS infrastructure, Mecum was able to confirm that all three major U.S. cellular carriers — Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile — will be participating in using and paying for the DAS, meaning that customers of any of the aforementioned providers will be able to take advantage of new deployments, including some new under-seat antenna enclosures.

“It’s not good for the public if people are boxed out,” said Mecum, praising the “good relationship” between the carriers around the stadium DAS.

Verizon customers, however, will have the added advantage of being able to connect to 5G services at Raymond James Stadium, if they have an advanced handset that supports the company’s 5G signals. While there aren’t really any applications that can only be used on 5G, Mecum did say that 5G connections are “about 25 times faster than 4G,” so overall a user experience on 5G should be better.

Like in many other NFL stadiums, at Raymond James Stadium Verizon also does have an autoconnect feature that will switch Verizon customers over to the venue’s Wi-Fi network if their devices have their Wi-Fi radios active. But Mecum did suggest that Verizon customers at the game who have 5G-capable phones may want to turn Wi-Fi off at the event, to take advantage of the 5G connectivity.

“We do have Wi-Fi authentication [at Raymond James Stadium] but I would say stay on 5G if you can,” Mecum said.

MatSing antennas and upgraded Wi-Fi

We are still waiting to hear back from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers about improvements made to the venue’s Wi-Fi network, and will provide details when we receive them. We also have seen several recent photos of the stadium showing deployments of a few MatSing lens antennas, something we’ve seen at several recent Super Bowls where MatSings are used to provide direct connectivity to sidelines, typically for media and photography bandwidth.

Zippin checkout-free system debuts at stadiums in Sacramento, Denver

A Zippin-powered checkout-free concessions stand at Golden 1 Center in Sacramento in 2019. Credit: Zippin/Sacramento Kings (click on any photo for a larger image)

Checkout-free shopping payment systems, where customers simply take items off shelves and are charged automatically as they leave the store, are now arriving in sports stadiums, with startup Zippin leading the way with active installations in Sacramento and Denver.

At the Sacramento Kings’ Golden 1 Center and at Empower Field at Mile High in Denver, trial concession stands powered by Zippin have already opened and been used by fans, both before the pandemic (in Sacramento) and during the past season at Empower Field, where the Denver Broncos had some games this fall with limited fan attendance.

The checkout-free store idea, pioneered by Amazon a few years ago, uses pre-visit payment information (collected either via an app or a credit-card swipe before entry) and a combination of in-store recognition technology — usually a mix of cameras, weight sensors and artificial intelligence software — to “see” what customers are taking off the shelves, and to charge the customers for those items as they leave the store.

While many customers are amazed the system actually works even after they leave a store, the potential checkout-free systems have to solve one of the biggest pain points of stadium visits — waiting in line for concessions — has generated considerable interest among venue owners and operators. And with transaction times in both Sacramento and Denver averaging less than a minute — and some in Sacramento as quick as 10 seconds — it’s a also good bet that fans will quickly embrace more checkout-free operations so that they can get back to their seats to watch the event they paid to attend.

Fans can’t believe it works

“It’s so intriguing to watch a fan go through the [checkout-free] process, and see how they react,” said Jay Morrison, district manager for Aramark, the concessionaire at Empower Field. At one of the Broncos games this fall Morrison was watching fans exit the Zippin-powered concession stand “and they would look around, sort of stand there and say that they can’t believe it,” Morrison said. And then, of course, the fans would share the experience on social media.

“In all my years of being in F&B, I’ve never seen somebody taking a picture of somebody buying a soda,” Morrison said.

Overhead cameras track customers as they select items. Credit: Zippin

While Amazon may have pioneered the checkout-free idea when it opened its first Amazon Go store in 2018, the market now has a growing number of startups seeking to become the back-end suppliers. But Zippin, a San Francisco-based startup with 50+ employees and $15 million in venture funding, is the first to crack into the stadium concessions market, an area that seems ripe for such innovation, especially given the new reality of supporting concession operations during a pandemic.

In Denver, Aramark had already decided to trial the Zippin technology at Mile High well before the pandemic put a premium on less human contact for transactions.

“The unintended benefit is that [checkout-free] fits perfectly with Covid and beyond,” said Aramark’s Morrison.

John Rinehart, president for business operations with the Sacramento Kings, noted that the Zippin system’s entry gate inherently delivers a way to enforce social distancing by limiting capacity inside the store as necessary.

Getting fans back to their seats

Like in Denver, Sacramento had decided to try the Zippin system well before the pandemic hit — at Golden 1 Center a Zippin-powered store was opened in September in 2019, as part of what Rinehart said is a continued desire to use technology to improve the fan experience.

“It’s kind of in our DNA to look out for these things,” said Rinehart of the arena that opened in 2016 with some of the most advanced wireless networking and display technologies, as well as one of the most innovative stadium apps.

Entry gate at Zippin stand at Empower Field. Credit: Zippin

At Golden 1 Center, the Zippin store was an open area on the main concourse, and in addition to coolers with drinks it also had an assortment of snacks, as well as a way to use Zippin to pay for hot food items like popcorn or pizza. According to Rinehart a customer would purchase a ticket for the hot items inside the Zippin store, and then go next door to a hot-food stand where their order would be fulfilled.

In Denver, Aramark added the Zippin technology to one the “Drink Market” stands it had opened at the stadium the year before, which were basically walk-through stands with self-serve glass-door drink coolers. In 2019, those stands used a unique visual-scanner system from Mashgin where fans would place items to be scanned and priced. The only staffing needed was one person at the end of the line to check IDs and to open cans and bottles before fans left.

With the Zippin technology, fans can either download an app or use their credit cards at the entry gate. Once they are authorized, they enter the store, select their items and simply walk out through the exit gate (again, where they would encounter one staffer for ID check and bottle/can opening).

According to Aramark’s Morrison, having support both for an app as well as walk-up credit card access was a key selling point for Zippin, since many fans have historically proven “resistant” to downloading and registering through an app.

While education on how the store works is necessary — in Denver and Sacramento both stadiums had signage as well as email instructions for the systems — Morrison also said that fans seem to learn the system quickly and are happy to tell others how it works.

And in both stadiums, operators saw fans coming back for repeated visits during a single game, since they knew they wouldn’t have to wait long.

“If you know what you want, you can get in and out in less than 10 seconds,” said the Kings’ Rinehart. Both Denver and Sacramento operators said they saw average visit times of around 45 seconds, an unthinkable speed for anyone who’s ever spent an entire baseball inning or half a football quarter waiting for a hot dog and a beer.

Minimal reconfiguration needed

According to Zippin CEO Krishna Motukuri, the Zippin-powered stands don’t need a lot of technology or networking support. The camera systems, he said, only use about 15-to-20 Mbps of network bandwidth, and the AI computations are done on the edge modules Zippin installs on the site.

Ceiling cameras seen in Zippin Denver stand. Credit: Zippin

Motukuri said Zippin operates under a software-as-a-service module, charging venue owners and operators a monthly fee and a per-transaction fee. According to Aramark’s Morrison the cost of a Zippin deployment is far cheaper than buying similar technology from Amazon, which Aramark had initially considered.

At Golden 1 Center Rinehart said the Zippin system was fairly easy to deploy, since the open-concourse setting allowed them to bring cameras down from above. In Denver, Aramark and the Broncos actually had to raise the ceiling on the area used, so that the Zippin cameras could have a better range of focus.

And according to Aramark’s Morrison the Zippin system reduced the needed real estate for checkout, using less than a third of the space required by the Mashgin systems. “That let us put four more beverage coolers into the space,” Morrison said. In addition to the cameras, a Zippin system also requires entry and exit gates, as well as sensors for all shelves holding items.

Using the pandemic to ‘leapfrog’ to the future

Zippin’s Motukuri, who founded the company in 2015, said that the Covid pandemic has exposed some of the issues that still plague other concession systems, the fact that there still may be a wait to purchase items.

“Self-checkout doesn’t get rid of lines,” Motukuri said. “Our system is not just frictionless, it’s contactless. It offers venues an opportunity to leapfrog ahead.” According to Zippin, a new Zippin-powered concession stand is set to open at the San Antonio Spurs’ AT&T Center when fans are allowed back in that building.

In Denver, Aramark’s Morrison said that the speed enabled by the Zippin system was part of the process that allowed the venue to re-open with limited attendance.

“The state of Colorado [regulators] observed us, and we had to deliver on the commitment [to safer operations],” Morrison said. “Having the self-order system was part of what enabled us to get back to having fans.”

(Zippin promotional video below)

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