As of the 2017 MLS season, the New York Red Bulls are the first professional sports team in North America to use Cisco Meraki, a new Wi-Fi solution from the San Francisco-based IT and technology company that included 150 access point throughout Red Bull Arena, parking lots and admission gates.
Shaun Oliver, Chief Operating Officer, explained that Cisco told the Red Bulls organization that it would be “trailblazers in the United States and North America as pioneers of this system.”
“With that, (Cisco) guaranteed us that whatever comes next, this system can handle, and you won’t have to be spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to build on whatever the next Facebook, Instagram, social media craze is and also what the next iBeacon and push notification stuff that we use to generate revenue here,” added Oliver. “We don’t have to reinvent the system for that. The system will evolve with us over the next five to 10 years so that 15 years down the line, we’re still using Meraki. That’s really what we bought into.”
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Oliver said that Red Bulls initially started having general conversations about the Wi-Fi capabilities at Red Bull Arena about four or five years ago when the venue first opened, calling it a “focal point.” During last season, Oliver, Peter Katic (Senior Director, Information Technology and Arena Systems) and the team started receiving proposals from different vendors.
Katic commented that the Cisco Meraki was a “lightweight solution in terms of a technical aspect,” adding that it had a bi-directional antenna and a free API the Red Bulls could use.
But, what does that mean in layman’s terms?
“It allowed us to create a highway that was already built and now we’re building the off ramps to that highway to fit our needs,” Oliver said. “So, the way we looked at it, is if you’re a car traveling down this highway on Meraki, every client, every fan has a different off ramp where they need to go and how they need to experience the stadium. The Meraki system already had that core highway built, so we’re just building the off ramps to that. It allows us to touch consumers, to touch clients and do that in a simple way where we’re not basically taking up half our stadium to build the infrastructure because the Meraki system is already built that way.”
With the core system in place, both Katic and Oliver called the new Wi-Fi integration an “evolutionary process” as it adapts to the new Meraki system, which is also used in one of Madrid’s premier indoor stadiums, WiZink Center (Palacio de Deportes).
“(Meraki is) built on the theory that it will evolve over time of what fan engagement is and what fans need. It allows us to continually build instead of three or four years down the road, have to tear everything down and rebuild the system to what the fans want,” Oliver said.