Carolina Panthers and Beam Wireless testing CBRS at Bank of America Stadium

Beam Wireless engineers testing CBRS signals in the Bank of America Stadium press box. Credit all photos: Beam Wireless/Carolina Panthers

The Carolina Panthers and Beam Wireless are currently testing a live CBRS network at Bank of America Stadium, as a sort of experience-gathering exercise that the team hopes will help them roll out services and applications on the new bandwidth sometime soon.

“It’s a trial right now but we see this definitely becoming something permanent,” said James Hammond, director of IT for the Panthers, in a phone interview this week. According to Hammond and Beam, the team and the integrator have set up several live Ruckus APs in the stadium, running a small network on the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) airwaves, a swath of spectrum in the 3.5 GHz range. This test follows some other public trials of the CBRS service that have launched following the September approval by regulators for initial commercial deployments.

Kevin Schmonsees, chief technology officer for Beam Wireless, said the Bank of America setup was testing CBRS connectivity between the Ruckus APs and some client-side devices, including USB sticks and Cradlepoint modems. The team and Beam representatives were running the CBRS network live during last Saturday’s ACC Championship Game at the stadium, mainly to see if there were any conflicts between the CBRS setup and the stadium’s existing DAS and Wi-Fi networks.

“Part of the test was to see how all three networks play together,” Schmonsees said.

According to the team and Beam, there was no interference between the different networks, with everything on CBRS performing as expected. Though Hammond admitted the Panthers still don’t have any concrete plans for what applications they might run on a CBRS network, the promise of more spectrum that doesn’t have to be shared is attractive just on its own right.

“It’s extremely useful to have [a network] the fans can’t impact,” Schmonsees noted.

Michelle Rhodes, CEO and president of the Greenville, S.C.-based Beam, said the pilot network also gives the Panthers a place to test new devices that are entering the CBRS ecosystem, like the iPhone 11 line recently introduced by Apple.

“Having the live network gives the stadium a good understanding of anything they might want to deploy,” Rhodes said.

A Ruckus CBRS-enabled AP in a concourse at Bank of America Stadium

Another Ruckus CBRS AP in the stadium

Top-down approach brings Wi-Fi to OKC Thunder’s Chesapeake Energy Arena

Chesapeake Energy Arena, home of the NBA’s Thunder. Credit all photos: Oklahoma City Thunder

If there’s one sure thing about stadium Wi-Fi deployments, it’s that pretty much no two networks are ever exactly the same. So even as there is a growing large-venue trend for putting Wi-Fi access points under seats or in handrails, sometimes the traditional top-down method is still the one that works best.

Such was the case for the first full fan-facing Wi-Fi network at Chesapeake Energy Arena in Oklahoma City, home of the NBA’s Thunder. With a large amount of retractable seating in the 18,000-seat venue, an under-seat approach to Wi-Fi would prove too costly and disruptive, leading the team to look for connectivity from above.

While a solid in-building cellular distributed antenna system (DAS) had done a good job of keeping fans connected the last few years, the team’s desire to have more mobile insight to fan activity as well as a switch to a Wi-Fi-centric point of sale system led Oklahoma City to finally install fan-facing Wi-Fi throughout the venue.

Chris Nelson, manager of information technology for venue manager SMG, and Tyler Lane, director of technology for the Thunder, spoke with Mobile Sports Report about the recent Wi-Fi deployment at Chesapeake Energy Arena, which went live during the most recent NBA season.

An AP placement in the rafters

Though the venue looked at all options, Nelson said that going under-seat with APs would have been “very costly” to do, given the large number of retractable seats in the arena.

“We wanted to hang them [APs] from the top if we could,” Nelson said.

After testing the top equipment brands available, the Thunder settled on Ruckus gear, for what they said was a simple reason, one involving the 96 feet in air space from the catwalk to the arena floor.

“Ruckus was the only one whose gear could reach down all the way,” Nelson said.

Adding to the fan experience

Editor’s note: This report is from our latest STADIUM TECH REPORT, an in-depth look at successful deployments of stadium technology. Included with this report is a profile of the new Wi-Fi network at Allianz Field in St. Paul, Minn., and an in-depth research report on the new Wi-Fi 6 standard! DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY now!

According to the team the deployment saw 410 total APs used, with 350 in the arena proper and another 60 deployed across the street at the Cox Convention Center. According to the Thunder’s Lane, the team rolled out the service slowly at first, with some targeted testing and feedback from season ticket holders.

Close-up of an AP placement

“We got some good feedback and then when we went to a full rollout we had signage in the concourses, communications via ticketing services and announcements over the PA and on the scoreboard,” to tell fans about the system, said Lane.

According to statistics provided by the team, the Wi-Fi was getting good traction as the season went on, with a March 16 game vs. the Golden State Warriors seeing 589.3 gigabytes of traffic, from 2,738 clients that connected to the network. Lane said the team employed Jeremy Roach and his Rectitude 369 firm to assist with the network design; Roach in the past helped design networks at Levi’s Stadium and Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center.

Now that the Wi-Fi network is in place, Lane said the Thunder is starting to increase the ways it can add to the fan experience via digital means, including app-based features like showing press conferences live and by having an artificial intelligence chatbot to help provide fans with arena information.

“It’s really all about enhancing the fan experience,” Lane said, with an emphasis on driving digital ticketing use in the YinzCam-developed team app. Lane said that the system also drives a lot of mobile concessions traffic, and added that “Ruckus did a fantastic job of asking all the right questions for our food and beverage partners.”

CommScope buying Arris (and Ruckus) for $7.4 B

CommScope announced today its intent to acquire Arris International for $7.4 billion, a move that would also bring in Wi-Fi vendor Ruckus, an asset that could help turn CommScope into a single-stop shop for large public venue connectivity products and services.

Financial details are available in the official announcement, but what will be more interesting will be how CommScope now markets itself to large public venues, like stadiums, for connectivity solutions. Previously known for its cellular distributed antenna system (DAS) infrastructure and back-end operations, with Ruckus in its portfolio CommScope could now offer an end-to-end solution for stadiums including DAS and Wi-Fi and also for those interested in Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) services in the near future.

Though commercial deployments for CBRS systems have not yet emerged, Ruckus has been a leader in the testing and certification process and is expected to be at the forefront of CBRS hardware providers when systems are ready to come online, possibly sometime next year.

If you’re keeping score (like we are), this is the third Ruckus has been acquired in the last two years. The list:

Feb. 22, 2017: Arris to acquire Ruckus from Brocade as part of $800 million deal

April 4, 2016: Brocade buys Ruckus for $1.2 B

That’s a lot of email changes and a closet full of new logowear…

LAFC scores technology hat trick at Banc of California Stadium

Banc of California Stadium, the new home of the Los Angeles Football Club. Credit all photos: Terry Sweeney, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

There’s an elegance to the advancing striker – the foot work, feints, arc of the kick – as they target the opponent’s goal. For the Los Angeles Football Club, that elegance gets reflected back in its newly christened home field, Banc of California Stadium, with its graceful lines and minimalist design, plus visibility and a connection to the field rivaling venues half its size.

LAFC, one of Major League Soccer’s newest expansion teams, had a particular sort of experience in mind for fans inside the venue, with its capacity of 22,000. The steeply pitched stands create an intimate sporting and entertainment space. Multiple clubs, suites and concession areas are there to satisfy food and beverage desires. Team owners were equally adamant about having top-notch technology, according to Christian Lau, vice president of information technology for LAFC, especially where wireless networking was concerned. The requirement was for “unprecedented coverage,” he added. “We wanted to avoid doing any retrofitting for at least five years.”

Opened in April, LAFC’s gleaming new stadium sits adjacent to the Los Angeles Coliseum (home to USC football, and to the NFL’s Rams, at least for now), replacing what used to be the Los Angeles Sports Arena. That structure was demolished in early 2016 and LAFC’s lengthy list of owners (Peter Guber, Magic Johnson, Will Ferrell and Mia Hamm, to name just a few of the sports and entertainment luminaries with a stake in the team) set the timer for April 29, 2018, LAFC’s first home game for its inaugural season.

Construction crews worked relentlessly to meet the deadline; the venue was ready one month early, thanks to good planning and construction crews putting in 16-hour days to be ready for BofC Stadium’s debut. On April 29, the gates opened and a new era had begun with the ‘hat trick’ of a fiber backbone, solid wireless coverage and an advanced app strategy.

The optics of LAFC networking

Editor’s note: This profile is from our latest STADIUM TECH REPORT, an in-depth look at successful deployments of stadium technology. Included with this report is a profile of a new MatSing ball DAS deployment at Amalie Arena, a new under-seat DAS deployment for the San Francisco Giants at AT&T Park, and a look at the new DAS at Wrigley Field! DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY now!

No doubt where you are at. Welcome to LA… FC.

The foundation for LAFC’s networking is a gigabit passive optical network (GPON) backbone with two chassis, plus fiber links from two service providers, AT&T and Crown Castle. The stadium backbone is 10-Gbps fiber with 100-Gbps dark fiber in place, Lau explained. LAFC is one of just a few sporting venues using GPON, along with Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, and Texas A&M’s Kyle Field in College Station. Perhaps not coincidentally, the technology contractor for all three projects was IBM.

Wi-Fi was an obvious requirement for BofC Stadium; back-of-the-house networks support ticketing processes at the gates, along with POS applications and LAFC administrative needs. Fan-facing Wi-Fi (“LAFC Guest”) blankets the venue with 487 access points; Lau’s leaving open the door to add more APs as requirements dictate. About 60 percent of the existing APs are installed under seats in the stands. Ruckus Networks is the Wi-Fi AP vendor and helped with system engineering and tuning.

While engineered for 70,000 users, the venue’s Wi-Fi has been averaging about 8,700 simultaneous users, according to Lau. The LAFC Guest network has no landing page since at some venues, loading times for landing pages can be long, leading to frustrated users abandoning the Wi-Fi. Users have also come to consider Wi-Fi a de facto amenity, so LAFC wanted to ensure its guest Wi-Fi network was easily and quickly accessible, Lau said.

The DAS details

On the cellular side, LAFC called on wireless services and engineering firm Mobilitie to pull together the distributed antenna system (DAS) for BofC Stadium. The venue’s DAS network consists of 25 zones powered by Ericsson gear; there are 160 antennas and over 7 miles of cabling to handle nearly 1.5 million square feet of DAS coverage.

Wireless gear covers the concessions areas

All four of the major wireless carriers — AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint – have signed up for BofC’s DAS network. Verizon was on air for the first game; Sprint was scheduled to fully integrate into the DAS network by the end of June, according to Stephanie Gray, senior director, wireless coverage solutions for Mobilitie.

LAFC was looking something transformative in its use of technology that would set BofC stadium apart from other stadiums, Gray told Mobile Sports Report. LAFC wanted seamless wireless especially in transition zones, part of strict requirements for the DAS network.

“They wanted a high percentage of coverage throughout the venue, particularly where people are using SeatGeek and wireless/paperless ticketing at the gates,” she explained. “We needed optimum coverage that could handle the stadium under load.”

Mobilitie brought engineering know-how to deal with the inevitable onsite quirks unique to every venue. In the case of BofC Stadium, the overall design aesthetic is modern and slick. The ceiling materials in many parts of the stadium – clubs, suites and some concession areas — are sheathed in metal, which presents an RF propagation challenge for RF, reducing signal strength.

On-field DAS coverage was also challenging, according to Jamie Witherspoon, director, technical solutions, for Mobilitie. Antennas had to be mounted on stadium trusses before the trusses were craned into place, an unusual technical cart-before-the-horse process. The reason? Cherry-picker equipment couldn’t be on the field or its freshly laid sod to adjust DAS antennas. In addition, Witherspoon reported lots of negotiations with the architecture firm, Gensler, to ensure the DAS antennas were as unobtrusive as possible and to preserve the stadium’s design aesthetic.

“With DAS, we’re more accustomed to building out a pre-existing venue, coming in after the fact,” Witherspoon explained. “This was brand new construction, so we had to work around multiple construction teams.”

Bandwidth snapshots

Mobile Sports Report put the fan-facing Wi-Fi and DAS to the test at BofC Stadium’s opening day, a match between LAFC and the Seattle Sounders. We sampled upload and download speeds around the stadium using the Speedtest app to measure performance. All our tests are only from Verizon’s services inside the venue.

Underseat mounts for Wi-Fi

In general, the BofC wireless services appear well engineered and cover the stadium’s common areas effectively. As to be expected, bandwidth performance was higher in the areas around the suites and clubs, where Wi-Fi downloads clocked in anywhere from 12.38 Mbps in the Sunset Loge on the west side of the stadium to 15.26 Mbps in the Founder’s Club. Wi-Fi upload speeds came in at 63.92 Mbps and 71.94 Mbps, respectively, the highest speeds measured in our tests at BofC Stadium.

Verizon’s DAS wasn’t as fast as the guest Wi-Fi. Highest DAS download speed at the south concessions was 37.67 Mbps; Section 123 on the southern side of the bowl came in at 35.43 Mbps. Highest upload speed for DAS service was 21.42 Mbps in the southeast concession area, followed by 20.92 Mbps around the southwest concessions.

A couple areas were less robust from a wireless bandwidth perspective. The DAS performance in the concession area outside the Figueroa Club on the east side of the stadium measured 9.4 Mbps download/10.97 Mbps upload; guest Wi-Fi in the west concessions area came in at 8.58 Mbps/1.93 Mbps, while Wi-Fi in the south concession wasn’t much better at 8.27 Mbps/1.98 Mbps. But generally, the guest Wi-Fi outperformed Verizon’s DAS and most Wi-Fi download/upload speeds were in the double-digits of megabits per second.

Prepping the LAFC app

LAFC worked with mobile integrator Venuetize to build out the team’s app, using the MLS team app template as its foundation. As a new team and one that started its season with a succession of away games, there was no reason to have stadium-based features in the app’s first iteration, said Lou Fontana, vice president of project management for Venuetize. The earliest iteration of the LAFC app concentrated more on content pieces, followed by the BofC Stadium-specific features.

LAFC’s app features both mobile ticketing and a sophisticated digital wallet for making onsite purchases for food or team merchandise. LAFC’s Lau volunteered that the organization is looking to have totally digital ticketing by 2019 – no paper, no PDFs to print out. Venuetize did some backend integration with payment processing partner Vantive; the ticketing part of the app works with ticket marketplace and aggregator SeatGeek.

Wi-Fi APs point down from the rafters

The LAFC app also uses and artificial intelligence-powered chatbot named Otto to help with stadium info, developed by Satis.fy. A future iteration of Otto will take it out of the Web’s view and make it a native view, incorporating elastic search. “That will enable fans to ask about players and the team schedule, and will replace search function in the app,” Fontana said, adding the upgrade could come sometime this summer.

The current version of the app has video, served up from MLS’s site. Immediate replay is something Venuetize will work on with LAFC. “When is the video content source available? That’s an issue,” Fontana said, adding that scoring plays make it out of the MLS server within about 25 minutes. While Venuetize could take that content and make it native, it’s not a top priority for the team at the moment.

BofC Stadium has installed Bluetooth beacon technology. “We haven’t gone through process of dialing in beacons, but wayfinding and navigation are on the list” for the LAFC app, Fontana said.

The integrator is also looking at GameChanger MVP, an augmented reality game developer, for a scoreboard game to fold in. “AR gaming will be the next interesting thing” for sports apps generally, according to Fontana.

Successful opener for LAFC at Banc of California Stadium in Los Angeles

Banc of California Stadium looks over downtown Los Angeles on its opening game day. Credit all photos: Terry Sweeney, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

First you heard the booming bass of drums, then came the chanting of thousands (“FC!…LA!…FC!”). You may not see the Banc of California Stadium at first, but this aural GPS guides fans toward Major League Soccer’s newest venue, which opened April 29 with expansion team Los Angeles Football Club. With a final price tag of $350 million (~$100 million over its original budget), the stadium is the most expensive for a soccer-specific venue.

First things first: The Ruckus-based Wi-Fi and its 500 access points functioned beautifully, as did the DAS network that Mobilitie helped engineer – more on that in our upcoming summer STADIUM TECH REPORT issue next month.

The freshly minted wireless infrastructure ensured attendees on opening day could Instagram the U.S. Navy paratroopers landing center field, trailing colored smoke out of their heels (black and yellow/gold, LAFC’s colors, of course). Or the surprise appearance of comedian Will Ferrell (who also owns part of LAFC), balancing a hooded bird of prey on his wrist. Olly, LAFC’s mascot, then hopped to the arm of its usual handler who released the falcon, thrilling the crowd with its gliding and swooping, completely unfazed by 22,000 fans and their cheers.

But for sheer endurance, raucous fans in the north stands put on the biggest show, beating drums, waving flags (Brazil, Argentina, Portugal, to name a few), and singing fight songs. The drummers kept things lively throughout the game, even if they were occasionally obscured by the yellow/gold smoke bombs set off at strategic moments.

A blazing open to the LAFC’s new home.

At regular intervals throughout the inaugural game against the Seattle Sounders, the feeling was less southern California and more like one of South America’s soccer stadiums.

The stadium is well named, if only because it has the sound and spirit of a giant cash register. Multiple establishments – Founders Club, Sunset Deck, Field Level Club, Figueroa Club, Directors Lounge – ensure no one goes hungry or thirsty. Luxury suites fill in the gaps. Down on the main level, LA’s tastiest eateries (tacos, barbecue, Korean, shawarma, coffee, craft beers) have outlets and the lines were long on opening day. There are also the obligatory team merchandise and souvenir stands and season ticket vendors.

Making money is one goal for LAFC, but so is winning games. LAFC triumphed in its debut home game 1-0, thanks to a free kick by team captain Laurent Ciman. That’s an auspicious start for MLS’s newest franchise and its shiny newest stadium.

Video boards are big at Banc of California Stadium

Steep seating pitches and sun screens make this stadium fan-friendly

The entry to the newest stadium in the MLS

More Wi-Fi consolidation as Riverbed acquires Xirrus

Network management company Riverbed announced a definitive agreement to acquire Wi-Fi provider Xirrus, for an undisclosed fee. The move is just the latest in a string of acquisitions of standalone Wi-Fi companies, following Hewlett Packard’s purchase of Aruba in 2015 and the journeys of Ruckus Wireless, which was first bought by Brocade and is now on its way to being a part of Arris.

While Riverbed said it would continue to offer Xirrus’ Wi-Fi products as a standalone business, its interest in Xirrus’ Wi-Fi technology is most likely in the enterprise office market. While nowhere near the size of players like Cisco or Aruba in the stadium wireless networking arena, Xirrus did have some wins in the space, including deals where its equipment was resold by Avaya. More as we hear more on the deal.

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