Focus WiFi appointed to provide full stadium wireless coverage for all visitors and fans.

With the ever-growing desire for WiFi in public venues, Sussex Cricket took on the challenge of providing coverage throughout the stadium and all the conferencing areas within the ground. They had regular requests from visitors matches and also visitors to conferences & meetings at the club.

The Challenge

Sussex Cricket Club is a complex ground made up of multiple buildings of offices, conference and meeting areas, hospitality boxes and the main stands for supporters to watch the matches. Much of the cabling and existing infrastructure was run in ducts under the pitch. This provided a huge challenge to provide high quality wireless to all those areas.

The scope was to provide full coverage to the site, with separate networks for guest access, staff access and short-term networks for particular conferences and music concerts. For match days, the network needed to be able to cope with up to 7000 spectators who may all want to use the wireless.

The Solution

Focus designed a thorough solution for Sussex Cricket Club taking into account the needs for infrastructure upgrades to support the requirement, the need for all cabling to be run for the solution and the requirements for data capture and social media integration.

A thorough survey was undertaken of the club to determine the current wireless coverage, test new locations and then scope potential new cable runs.

The first phase was to install the infrastructure. Focus provided a high speed 200mb lease line connection to the club and installed a Sonicwall Firewall to manage this connection. This allowed the club to utilise all the 200mb bandwidth and apportion different speeds to different areas of the club.

New comms locations were installed through the many buildings with a fibre links back to the primary network cabinet. Shorter cat5 runs were then run from these locations to all the required access point locations. A huge amount of this cabling was run in ducts under the main pitch so huge care had to be taken to ensure the pitch was returned to its original state and all works had to be completed in a short period of time before the season start. Other cabling was discretely installed throughout the ground.

Enterprise grade infrastructure was installed through the ground to link all the wireless and corporate network. A mix of internal and external Ubiquiti access points were installed to provide the coverage itself.

Finally, Focus’s social port was setup on the guest network. Each visitor to the club would be prompted to register for the wireless via email, Facebook, Instagram or Twitter. This data was hugely valuable to the marketing team at Sussex to provide fans updates on the club and increase their presence on Social Media.

The Result

Focus provided the wireless solution in a relatively small-time frame in the clubs out of season but the results were fantastic. As the first match of the season rolled round, the results were instant.

WiFi coverage was fantastic, there was no impact on the corporate network on match days that they’d had with the previous solution and fans had access to high speed internet at all times.

The new back bone infrastructure has also enabled the club to expand there office space on site and extent the IT to areas previously cut off.