Super Bowl's super-stadium offers state-of-the-art wireless
This year's Super Bowl
stadium will welcome the Patriots, Giants and their fans with an advanced wireless
system. Actually, several of them.
Less than 18 months old, the University
of Phoenix Stadium in Glendale, Ariz., is home to the Arizona Cardinals
football team. But its 1.7 million square feet of space, looking
like a gigantic aluminum cheese Danish, hosts an array of other tenants
and visitors, from other bowl games like the Tostitos Fiesta Bowl, to the Rolling
Stones and the World of Wheels Autorama. To serve them, and up to 63,400 fans,
the stadium offers pervasive Wi-Fi, wall-to-wall support for five different
cellular carriers, and a separate, dedicated 450MHz public safety net.
Most of the wireless signals are being carried via a combination of single-mode
fiber and coaxial cable to and from ceiling-mounted antennas, all part of a
system
from MobileAccess of Vienna, Va. The company is one of several vendors of
so-called "in-building wireless" or "distributed antenna"
systems, which typically transport multiple kinds of wireless signals to distributed
antennas. The result enables pervasive high-quality cellular and Wi-Fi coverage,
and lets base stations and Wi-Fi access points be centralized in one or a few
locations.
Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, one of the busiest in the
nation, adopted
a similar approach, using products from LCG
Wireless.
Distributing wireless
MobileAccess
has several components in a central head-end, usually including base stations
from cellular operators, linked via fiber to remote hubs, where the Wi-Fi access
points are collected. The hubs link via coax cable to the 5-inch dome-shaped
distributed antennas. Among other things, the MobileAccess gear transports the
wireless signals, acts as repeaters and offers extensive network management
features.
The in-building wireless system was part of the original plan for the $450
million, multi-use
stadium, which boasts both a retractable roof and playing field, says Mark
Feller, vice president for technology, Arizona
Cardinals. The stadium does not have a traditional data center: Instead,
it has the MDF, or main data facility, which houses and connects the infrastructure
of all-Cisco routers and switches, and phone lines and other facilities. For
the Cardinals, this central room is a way station that links Cardinal voice
and data users in the stadium with the data center proper at the team's headquarters
several miles away in neighboring Phoenix.
Other stadium tenants, such as the Arizona Sports and Tourism Commission, the
concession service and a security company, use this flat IP net infrastructure
for voice and internet
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