Levi’s Stadium

Levi’s Stadium app adds more ticketing, social media features for 2015 season

September 14, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

Levi’s Stadium app showing direct link to 49ers team app. All photos: Paul Kapustka, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

You aren’t yet allowed to order up a touchdown or click a link to guarantee a 49ers victory, but new enhancements to the Levi’s Stadium app should make the game experience even better this season for all fans who visit Santa Clara for NFL games.

John Paul, CEO of Levi’s Stadium app developer VenueNext, laid out some of the improvements that fans will see when they use the stadium app starting at tonight’s season opener against the Minnesota Vikings. Tops among the enhancements are greater integration with the Niners’ separate team app, better support for electronic ticketing, and some interesting social media features that include the chance to see yourself live on one of the new big-screen TVs installed over the football offseason.

Though the Levi’s Stadium app got a good workout in 2014, with somewhere north of 200,000 unique users, Paul noted that number means there’s still a lot of Levi’s Stadium visitors who still haven’t heard of or bothered to use the app. “We’d love for more people to be aware of it [the app],” Paul said, and one way the VenueNext team is hoping to increase that number is through one-click integration with the existing team app, which focuses more on content and team information, and not the stadium-specific things like food ordering and ticketing that the Levi’s Stadium app supports.

App showing ability to buy pricey parking ticket for your RV

The integration will start with one-click logos on both apps that lead directly to the other one — in the Levi’s Stadium app case, there is now a 49ers logo in the upper right corner that takes you directly to the team app (or to the app store if you haven’t downloaded it yet). Paul also said that if fans log in to the team’s Faithful 49 loyalty program on either app, they will be logged in on the other app automatically, so that any of the points-earning activities are tracked more easily.

Easier ticket transfers

Paul also said the Levi’s Stadium app will support more and easier electronic ticketing features, like the ability to transfer multiple tickets in one transaction, instead of having to do transfers ticket by ticket as was required last year. The app this season will also support in-game purchases of tickets to ancillary events and services, like the pregame RedZone Rally party area or the postgame Michael Mina parties. Fans can also use the app now to purchase premium parking, Paul said, and be guided right to the reserved spots via the app.

New outward-facing TV screen at Dignity Health gate

A fun new program with the app could allow fans to see themselves on the new big TV installed at the Intel gate, provided they log in to social media accounts with Twitter, Facebook or Instagram and tag a picture of themselves with the #levisstadium hashtag. Paul said Niners interns will be scouting hashtagged photos and then trying to match them to fans who are identified by beacons outside the Intel gate. If it works, fans should get a text or message alerting them to their pending 7 seconds of fame. “That feature should be a lot of fun,” Paul said.

And behind the scenes, Paul said that the VenueNext team worked hard to improve the app’s functionality when it encounters variable network connectivity, such as when a fan is connected to the Wi-Fi network but gets up and moves, an action that can temporarily cause a loss of connection. This year, Paul said, such actions shouldn’t affect things like food orders that have already been activated, since the app will work better on the back end to preserve such actions even if the user gets disconnected.

Not yet ready for launch but coming soon are two other interesting app features: One, Paul said, will allow fans to pay for and send (via in-seat delivery) food and beverage orders to other people in the stadium, provided they know that person’s phone number and seat location. Another feature will allow fans to use the stadium’s beacon-powered location system to meet each other, with the app showing where people are en route to an agreed meeting location. The first feature, Paul said, might be operational by the second game of the season, Oct. 4 vs. the Packers; the meetup function, he said, might not surface until mid-season.

Paul could not comment on any other VenueNext stadium deployments — the company has said publicly that it will have 30 new clients before the year’s end, and at the recent SEAT conference this summer yours truly heard several well-placed rumors that said VenueNext had signed other NFL team deals, but none have yet been publicly confirmed. Watch this space for more info soon!

Filed Under: Apple, Apps, DAS, Facebook, Instagram, Intel, Levi's Stadium, NFL, Social Media, Sports Social Media, Wi-Fi Tagged With: Apps, DAS, John Paul, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, VenueNext, Wi-Fi

DGP upgrades Levi’s Stadium DAS in preparation for Super Bowl 50

September 14, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

New ‘chiclet’ DAS antennas visible on the concourse overhangs at Levi’s Stadium. All photos: Paul Kapustka, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

After deploying one of the biggest and most robust stadium DAS networks at Levi’s Stadium last year, what did DAS Group Professionals do for an encore?

How about completely re-deploying a new DAS at Levi’s Stadium during the football offseason, just about doubling the capacity in a construction project that took place at a “live” venue instead of one under construction?

The ambitious renovation of the not-quite-1-year-old Levi’s Stadium DAS was all done in the name of Super Bowl 50, the NFL’s big game that is coming to Levi’s Stadium in February 2016. According to DGP president Steve Dutto, the huge jump in wireless traffic statistics at Super Bowl XLIX last February got the major wireless carriers working early to assure that the NFL’s 50th Super Bowl would have enough cellular capacity.

In addition to new antennas from DAS gear supplier JMA Wireless that can be more finely tuned, and more antennas and remote units to beef up coverage and support more cell sectors inside Levi’s Stadium, DGP and stadium owner the San Francisco 49ers also increased the DAS footprint outside the stadium in the adjacent parking lots, addressing what Niners COO Al Guido told MSR was a “primary concern” heard from fans during the inaugural Levi’s Stadium season.

Close-up of new DAS antennas (from mid-July, before the wires were connected)

Though work on the DAS will likely continue throughout the season, most of the construction and deployments were expected to be in place for the Niners’ regular season opener tonight versus the Minnesota Vikings.

Ready for another ‘Super’ cellular day

Though the unofficial totals for DAS traffic at the last Super Bowl that were in excess of 6 terabytes were the highest we’ve ever seen reported, DGP’s Dutto said that the top wireless carriers are expecting as much as 2.5 times that amount of traffic at Super Bowl 50, a load that might have swamped even the previously robust Levi’s Stadium DAS.

“The [cellular] traffic at the Super Bowl this past year was greater than anything anybody had seen,” Dutto said in a recent interview at Levi’s Stadium. All the carriers, he said, were “amazed” at the traffic jump from the year before, when AT&T and Verizon Wireless reported a combined total of about 2.5 TB of cellular data at Super Bowl XLVIII at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey. (For what it’s worth the Wi-Fi traffic also just about doubled, from 3.3 TB to 6.23 TB.)

The DGP team at Levi’s for our interview included, L to R, Derek Cotton, director of engineering; Steve Dutto, president; and Vince Gamick, VP and COO.

So even though the Levi’s Stadium DAS performed exceedingly well — according to Dutto “we turned it on and from day one it exceeded expectations” — and that there wasn’t any capacity problems during the Niners’ 2014 season, the expected impending crush coming in February spurred what Dutto called “carrier-driven upgrades” that included the need to take over some previous storage-room space to house the increased amount of head-end gear.

Under seat DAS antennas part of the upgrade

Inside the stadium itself, Dutto said that Verizon will expand its coverage from 60 to 80 sectors, while AT&T will increase from 45 to 54 or more sectors. DGP will increase its “zones” of coverage in the main seating bowl from 23 to 40, and will go from 250 antennas to 400, and from 330 remote units to 450. There will also be plenty of new antennas from JMA that Dutto said have “greater gain and sharper patterns” to enhance coverage.

“It’s almost like deploying twice the network in the same amount of time,” Dutto said. The other big difference from last year, however, was that Levi’s Stadium was open for events this past football offseason, from WrestleMania 31 to a NHL Stadium Series game to concerts with the Grateful Dead and Taylor Swift.

Another view of the antennas on the concourse overhangs

Though there was more than enough cabling areas and pathways to make the retrofit easier, Dutto said working around the live events increased the deployment degree of difficulty. But even with new head end rooms and extras like under-seat DAS antennas (a new deployment method at Levi’s Stadium for DAS), 20-plus new antenna placements in the parking lot and the accomodation of new 2.5-GHz spectrum for Sprint, Dutto said that the new network was expected to be at least “90 percent complete” before the season’s start.

As is regular with lead-ups to Super Bowls, there will likely be even more network tweaking and adjustment up until the last minute before kickoff on Feb. 7, 2016.

A ‘heart-attack” moment and hot dog machines

With any luck, the new network will work as well as the old one, and will hopefully light up without the “heart attack moment” that happened just before opening day last fall. Dutto and his team of Derek Cotton, director of engineering, and Vince Gamick, DGP’s vice president and COO, told of coming to Levi’s Stadium for the regular season opener last September and almost keeling over when they couldn’t detect the DAS network anywhere inside the building.

As it turns out, Dutto said that the major wireless carriers had forgot to turn down the power on their macro towers at the cell sites that surround Levi’s Stadium, which basically overwhelmed the internal network since Dutto said the outdoor cell sites operate at 80 watts, compared to the 2-watt in-stadium DAS network.

“There are six cell sites within hundreds of feet [of Levi’s Stadium] and since they hadn’t turned them down, we couldn’t see the network in the stadium,” said Dutto, whose pulse was revived when the situation was quickly rectified.

Close-up of the back of one of the new antennas

At least the Levi’s Stadium DAS couldn’t be turned off by stadium workers or blacked out by hot dog machines, problems that DGP encountered at the Niners’ old home, Candlestick Park, where DGP deployed a test DAS in the 49ers’ final season there in 2013. According to Dutto, for some reason the DGP network was connected by utility PG&E to the same electrical routes as the cookers for stadium hot dogs — and when those were turned on one Sunday the system was overloaded, bringing the DAS down with sausages.

The Candlestick DAS also suffered an outage when the park rangers who lived at the stadium thought the equipment air conditioners were too loud, so they turned them off — setting off multiple alarms for Dutto and his network administration team.

Safe to say, similar problems aren’t expected to arise as DGP and the Niners prepare Levi’s Stadium’s cellular network for Super Bowl 50, a tough task but one with rewards on both a personal and business level.

“This has been fun, and the Niners have been great to work with,” said Dutto.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, Levi's Stadium, NFL, Super Bowl, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, DAS Group Professionals, DGP, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless

Taylor Swift shows card 3+ TB each, and push Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi past half-million user mark

August 24, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

Taylor Swift at Levi’s Stadium. All photos: Levi’s Stadium (click on any picture for a larger image)

Because her humungous stage kept Levi’s Stadium from filling to capacity, Taylor Swift’s Aug. 14 and 15 shows didn’t come close to setting a Wi-Fi capacity record at the venue, as some had predicted. But with almost 20,000 unique users the first night and almost 24,000 the second, the “1989” tour events pushed the cumulative Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi user number past the half-million mark, just more than a year after the venue officially opened.

Thanks to Levi’s Stadium owners and operators, the San Francisco 49ers, we have some very interesting statistics about Wi-Fi use at large outdoor stadiums. Now that 509,524 unique users have logged in to the Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi network during its numerous football and other events, the networking team has some interesting observations, including the fact that concertgoers use more bandwidth than football fans.

Over the 28 events hosted at the stadium in the 54 weeks (not counting this past weekend’s preseason game with the Dallas Cowboys) the Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi network has carried a total of 56.88 terabytes of data, according to figures sent to us by Roger Hacker, senior manager, corporate communications for the Niners. One of the more interesting tidbits was the sustained connectivity during concert events; from Hacker, these direct notes:

Concerts generate up to 65% more load per fan than sporting events.

o For 2014 NFL season, the average fan on Wi-Fi used 100MB.

o For One Direction and Taylor concerts, the average fan consumed 164MB.

Concerts are generating higher sustained loads on the network than sporting events.

o For One Direction, the network was over 2 Gbps for 1 hour and 15 minutes continuously.

o For Taylor the network was over 2 Gbps for a total of 1 hour and 10 minutes continuously.

At many venues with Wi-Fi, the so-called “take rate” or the number of users actually logging in to the network is one key piece of data about how well the system is working. The idea is, the better it works, the more people log on. At the Taylor Swift concerts, the take rates were among the highest we’ve seen: For the first show with attendance of 50,393, there were 19,963 unique users on the Wi-Fi network; for the second show the numbers were 23,885 out of 52,479 in attendance.

Breaking 3 TB twice in a row

Let it be said, that even though the Swift concerts didn’t beat the all-time Levi’s Stadium Wi-Fi mark of 4.5 TB set by WrestleMania 31 back in March, each of the shows passed the 3 TB total mark, with 3.31 TB used on Aug. 14 and 3.807 TB used on Aug. 15. And remember, that’s with just a little more than 50,000 fans in the house, far fewer than the 76,976 who crammed in for the wrassling on March 31.

But even at other events that might not be as high on the “gotta do it” list, fans at Levi’s used the Wi-Fi in high numbers, as another of Hacker’s notes spells out:

On average, nearly 40% of people attending an event at Levi’s use the Wi-Fi.

For the first year, the average attendance at all events was 46,400 based on the VenueNext valid scans. (including smaller events as well as bigger events)

For the first year, the average unique wifi users per event was 18,200 (or 39% of attendance)

On-field Aruba Networks Wi-Fi AP at Levi’s Stadium

Part of what might have made the Swift audience bigger users of Wi-Fi was a new, improved temporary Wi-Fi network for the field seats, an innovation crafted by Wi-Fi gear supplier Aruba Networks and the Levi’s Stadium networking team. By putting temporary Wi-Fi APs on both the walls surrounding the field level, on railings in the temporary seats and even underneath the temporary flooring, the stadium provides service to the premium-seat customers, a challenge for NFL stadiums who must keep regular Sunday-game networks from bleeding into the field area (because that’s where the league operates its own Wi-Fi network for game operations). For what it’s worth, we also heard from DAS supplier DAS Group Professionals who said they were going to have temporary DAS antennas on the field as well for the Swift concerts. No DAS stats yet, however.

Earlier this summer at the annual SEAT Conference, we had a very interesting panel discussion about which stats really matter when it comes to stadium Wi-Fi usage — though I will always remain a sucker for top-line totals, I do agree that there should probably be separate categories for events like the Swift concerts, the WrestleMania events, and regular football games. What is catching my attention more lately are numbers like the sustained connectivity and the unique and concurrent numbers of users, since in the end the bottom line on stadium Wi-Fi network performance has to be how many people are using it. A year in, it looks like the Levi’s Stadium network has passed a crucial test, in that people are both finding it and using it, even if they are not regular attendees or season-ticket holders. Those facts say a lot about how well the Levi’s Stadium system works, and should be numbers stadium tech professionals look to when assessing their own deployments.

More Swift shots below. Enjoy.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, DAS, Levi's Stadium, MSR Guides, Wi-Fi Tagged With: DAS, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, One Direction, Paul Kapustka, San Francisco 49ers, SEAT Conference, Stadium Wi-Fi, Taylor Swift, Wi-Fi, Wrestlemania 31

Boingo, Aruba behind new Wi-Fi deployment at Kansas State’s football stadium

August 18, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

The WIldcats take the field at Bill Snyder Family Stadium. All photos: Kansas State website. (click on any photo for a larger image)

So far we haven’t seen any press releases but a web-posted letter to Kansas State supporters from Athletic Director John Currie confirms that Boingo Wireless and Aruba Networks are part of a new Wi-Fi and DAS deployment at the Bill Snyder Family Stadium that will have at least 300 antennas of some kind bringing service to the 50,000-seat venue.

Bill Snyder, still the head coach at the stadium that bears his name, will lead the Wildcats into the 2015 football season knowing that fans in Manhattan — Manhattan, Kansas — will now have sufficient bandwidth to stay connected while they cheer on the team. While the letter from AD Currie wasn’t clear on details and specifics — at least not to the MSR level of clarity — it did say that “When you arrive for Fan Appreciation Day this weekend [last weekend] you’ll likely notice a few of the 300-plus new Wi-Fi and Distributed Antenna System (DAS) fixtures being installed around Bill Snyder Family Stadium as we work to address connectivity for cell phones and other personal electronic devices throughout the stadium.” So we’re not sure if that means 300 APs for Wi-Fi and then a DAS, or if that means 300 antenna systems for both. We’ve got messages out to everyone involved, so watch for a follow-up with some more details as they are available.

Screenshot of map on new K-State app.

The letter from Currie went on to say that the network will be in a testing mode the first couple games, and then the school and its new communication partners will move on to bring similar connectivity to Bramlage Coliseum, the K-State hoops arena, before the basketball season starts.

New app as well

K-State also has a new gameday football app, built by the Boulder, Colo.-based Sportslabs, the first big program we’ve heard of that is using Sportslabs. We haven’t yet seen the app in action but according to the K-State website plug it seems like it will have most of the usual bells and whistles, but not anything fancier like instant replays or food ordering. Stay tuned as we get more info.

The K-State deal is a return to the public eye for Boingo, which had a spate of venue announcements a year or so ago and then pulled back out of the spotlight until coming back a bit recently with an NBA announcement. Boingo using Aruba gear is also a new twist for us, but not surprising as HP’s recent acquistion Aruba has been steadily winning new stadium deals and continues to innovate at already-deployed venues (watch for an upcoming report about the temporary on-field Wi-Fi network that Aruba and the San Francisco 49ers deploy for concerts and other events at Levi’s Stadium).

Are you ready for some football?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, DAS, Levi's Stadium, NCAA Football, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, Aruba Networks, Boingo Wireless, DAS, Kansas State, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, NCAA, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi

Tap.in2 seeks more orders in expanding market for stadium in-seat food delivery apps

August 12, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

Screen shot of Tap.in2’s Cavs Eats app. (Click on any photo for larger image)

After a successful beta-type trial with the Cleveland Cavaliers this past season, startup Tap.in2 is seeking new customers for its in-seat food and beverage delivery app, which lets sports fans order and receive concessions without having to stand in lines.

Unlike the well-publicized debut of stadium-wide in-seat delivery services offered last year at the San Francisco 49ers’ new Levi’s Stadium, the Tap.in2 program at the Cavs’ Quicken Loans Arena flew a bit under the radar and was only offered during the last 22 home games, including the Cavaliers’ home appearances in the NBA Finals. But according to Mike Jacobs, president and co-founder of the Cleveland-based Tap.in2, there are plenty of professional sports franchises interested in adding in-seat concessions delivery to their arenas, and Jacobs is confident Tap.in2 will soon announce some new customers beyond the Cavaliers and beyond the NBA.

Though he didn’t have any names to officially announce, Jacobs held a recent phone interview with MSR while at an airport en route to meeting with a potential (unnamed) new customer. With somewhere north of $575,000 in reported funding, the six full-time employees and six part-timers at Tap.in2 will be competing mainly with Levi’s Stadium app developer VenueNext and its recent $9 million funding round in the new but rapidly expanding market for stadium in-seat food delivery apps. VenueNext, which said it will soon announce as many as 30 new customers, is rumored to be bringing its food-delivery expertise to other NFL stadiums this fall, but so far MSR has been unable to confirm any official deals.

Avoiding the lines

If there’s any app whose potential value needs no explaining to sports fans it’s in-seat delivery, which targets one of the biggest pain points of attending live events: Having to wait in line for concessions. In the recent past many arenas have added delivery services for suites and premium seating areas, usually facilitated by ushers with handheld wireless devices for ordering. But in most venues, the balance of fans still have to queue up for food and beverages, usually missing some game action while doing so. But now, with most big arenas having high-capacity Wi-Fi and DAS networks, the idea is to let fans use their smartphones to order concessions, allowing them to enjoy more of what they came to the stadium for in the first place.

VenueNext screen shot of food ordering feature on app.

Tap.in2’s Jacobs said one such story from his game-attending past — a New York Yankees game back in 1993 — planted one seed for the idea that eventually became Tap.in2’s app. At that long ago game Jacobs remembers his father missing three innings of some crucial late-season action merely to obtain a soft pretzel and some hot chocolate. A couple years ago while at college in Berkeley, Jacobs and his roommate Jordan Syms took the idea of eliminating concession line time and ran with it, building the startup that would become Tap.in2, a career path that led them to Cleveland.

As a portfolio company at the startup accelerator called Bizdom started by Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert, Syms and Jacob led their team to deliver an app that would let food and beverages be delivered to Cavs fans — starting very very slowly but then building over time.

“For the first game the service was turned on, we had two seats live,” said Jacobs. The pair of lucky long-time Cavs season ticket holders, he said, racked up seven orders during the inaugural game, providing “good feedback.” After that the service was expanded to cover a single section, then two sections, eventually scaling up to support the entire lower bowl at the 20,562-seat Quicken Loans Arena. According to Jacobs by the end of the season the service was facilitating “hundreds” of orders per game and was already returning some interesting stats, like 80 percent of the orders being beverages and an average spend per order of $32. In addition to food and drinks, the Tap.in2 app also supports the sale of in-game “experiences,” like being able to shoot baskets on the court after the game.

Integration with existing app and services the key

Jacobs said the Tap.in2 technology is designed to be easily integrated with an existing team app, like the NeuLion-built app used by Cavs fans. He also credited food and beverage provider Aramark for having incredibly efficient operations to allow for smooth delivery of orders, a human engineering problem that can sometimes go haywire when scaled up unexpectedly.

Front screen of Cavs Eats app.

If there is any sticking point to the food and beverage delivery services it’s the human engineering side of the equation, mainly guessing how many “runners” will be needed to ensure prompt delivery of orders. Our guess is that unlike Levi’s Stadium, which offers the delivery service to every fan in every seat for NFL games, many stadiums will opt to start with delivery services to smaller sections of fans, like premium seating, until operational issues are fully worked out. (Most will probably have service to more than two seats, however.)

On the technical side, delivery apps need to integrate with back-of-the-house point of sale systems, and must be easy enough for fans to understand and stable enough for fans to trust with sensitive information like credit card numbers. But from industry interviews and reporting, it’s our guess that we will soon see a slew of food-delivery announcements at big pro and college venues this fall, from both VenueNext and possibly some from Tap.in2 as well. (Bypass Mobile, which once offered in-seat delivery via a service called Bypass Lane, appears to have completely switched to providing back-of-the-house POS systems for stadiums and other large public venues.) The trick for both the bigger VenueNext and Tap.in2 will be how well and how quickly they can integrate their delivery functionality with existing apps, something that is never an exact science.

Filed Under: Apps, Bypass Lane, DAS, Levi's Stadium, NBA, Wi-Fi Tagged With: Bypass Lane, Cleveland Cavaliers, DAS, in-seat delivery, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Quicken Loans Arena, Stadium Wi-Fi, VenueNext

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

August 3, 2015 by Paul Kapustka

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