To boost cellular connectivity at the venues and enable digital ticketing and parking passes and other aspects, the school is using a distributed antenna system (DAS) from AT&T, according to Travis Cameron, chief revenue officer and assistant athletic director.
“Running wires through old buildings obviously presents a lot of challenges,” Cameron says. “Anytime we do work, we try to introduce avenues for future work, whether that’s cordoning off additional ductwork or conduit, or whatever the task might require. We’ve found that anytime we need to do this type of work, it’s a significant investment, and a big part of that comes from the lack of that type of infrastructure.”
Cincinnati’s football stadium, built in 1915 at the center of campus, was designed to be openly accessible to the community, Di Fino says. At any given time, teenagers could be using the field for a flag football game, or local residents could be running up and down the stadium’s stairs during a workout. As a result, the stadium lacks permanent, defined gates that network access could be wired to.
“We don’t have a physical structure that says, ‘This is Gate A, enter here,'” Di Fino says. “Our IT folks found a way to get it done by putting transponders on buildings and making sure they’re pointed to the gates we generally set ticket scanning services at. There are a lot of buildings around, and that allows us to wire from those buildings.”
LEARN MORE: Stadium Wi-Fi connectivity and the college sports fan experience.
To implement the Bearcats Fast Pass entry option — which lets game attendees circumvent the line by getting their tickets scanned in a separate tailgating area and wearing wristbands that grant access to certain gates — the school discovered adjustments were necessary to ensure ticket scanning devices would function properly .
“We were actually out there three or four days before a game saying, ‘OK, let’s try to see if we get signal strength here,'” Di Fino says. “When we went to scan some of the tailgate areas, we didn’t have the network coverage on our scanners. So, we again had to work with our IT team. They figured out we just had to move a transponder.”