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January 15, 2014

The NFL Looks to Wi-Fi Analytics

Alex Woodie

Mother. Apple pie. Free Wi-Fi. Those are three things that have come to define the American culture. And thanks to a deal announced today between the National Football League and network solutions provider Extreme Networks, the NFL will have the means to not only optimize Wi-Fi signals in the league’s 32 football stadiums, but to begin monetizing the data coming out of them as well.

Extreme Networks competes against the likes of Cisco and other tier-one providers of network switches, routers, and Wi-Fi access points. The San Jose, California company also develops software analytic products that allow customers to monitor Wi-Fi usage in physical settings, which could be a mall, a college campus, or a 70,000-seat NFL stadium.

In an event today at the NFL headquarters in New York, the NFL announced that Extreme Networks will be the official supplier of Wi-Fi analytics for The League. This technology will be on display at the upcoming Super Bowl XLVIII (48, for those who don’t speak Latin), which is being held at MetLife Stadium, home of the New York Giants and the Jets.

There are two elements of this announcement that are noteworthy. For starters, ensuring good quality of service for wireless network connectivity at an event like the Super Bowl is no small task. During a regular season game, there’s in excess of 1TB of data flowing over the local airwaves to hundreds of access points and then out to redundant network links to Internet. Ensuring that each fan in the stadium can utilize their 1 to 2 Mbps of bandwidth (perhaps 8 Mbps per access point) is not easy. During the Super Bowl half time show, featuring Bruno Mars, you can expect tens of thousands of fans to upload video clips, which will stress the network but hopefully not break it. Nobody wants a repeat of last year’s 33-minute power outage during the big game in New Orleans.

The other interesting aspect is monitoring data usage patterns at NFL stadiums. Teams are interested in correlating and finding patterns among usage, location, device, and time. “This type of data can give the league a huge amount of insight on how best to interact with the fans,” says Mike Leibovitz, Extreme Networks’ director of mobility and applications.

NFL franchises that provide fast, free, and open Wi-Fi also maximize the chances that fans will interact with team-branded social media applications. At Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium, Extreme Networks gear provides access to a social media “game day” app that allows the team to interact with fans. “We routinely see 20,000 fans concurrently on the system pumping data through when they’re using the game day app,” Leibovitz says.

Other teams allow fans to order food and drink, to access video replays, to access video from any camera on the field, and even to listen to real-time audio from players mic’d up on the field. “Teams like the Philadelphia Eagles look at themselves as social media companies first and sporting companies second,” Leibovitz says. “They’re really trying to understand what those users are doing in the building and away from the building, and get that consistent approach.”

Representatives from the NFL and several teams took part in today’s announcement at NFL headquarters in New York

Not all NFL stadiums currently have Wi-Fi. In some venues, the teams have elected to allow local mobile carriers to install Wi-Fi to give their customers access. Due to the social media opportunities available, it is expected that every team will have Wi-Fi in the next year or two, Leibovitz says.

“There’s a level of maturity now where the league says owning the infrastructure, owning that fan experience and the data that’s coming off the network is highly advantageous to them,” he continues. “That’s the strategy that most teams will deploy Wi-Fi as their own asset and then down the road be able to monetize it in a number of different ways.”

That doesn’t mean that Roger Goodell will be snooping in your Gmail account, a la the National Security Agency (or Google itself, for that matter). None of the data that transmits along these open Wi-Fi channels at NFL stadiums will be stored, Leibovitz says. The League is being careful not to raise any privacy concerns, considering the hot water that some retailers have gotten in over their use of Wi-Fi to track customers.

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