Last month, WifiForward highlighted the growing trend of how sports fans are increasingly turning to live streaming to watch their favorite teams compete in the biggest games of the year. But as we are finding out, just as advances in technology have changed how we watch games from the comfort of our own home, it is also changing how we watch them in-person at one of over 150 stadiums across the country.

As of last season, over 90% of professional football stadiums were equipped to provide fans with in-game access to Wi-Fi. But why are professional sports stadiums placing such an emphasis on ensuring fans can connect to Wi-Fi in the middle of a ballgame? Simply put, in 2018 there’s an expectation that no matter where you go, you’ll always be connected. And as sporting venues become more high end, experience “palaces,” having Wi-Fi access is a consumer expectation.

As one league executive explained back in 2016, the push to make sure pro football stadiums were appropriately technologically-equipped, started off as a way to just keep younger fans interested, but quickly evolved into much more:

“When we first started talking about this, it was about the tolerance level for our younger fans. It was certainly a lot less for accessibility and connectivity for other fans. Now it’s every person who attends a game. [The Millennial issue] was a hypothesis we had, but it got shut down pretty fast when even in our fan surveys it came up over and over again when we didn’t have the connectivity.”

 

And Wi-Fi in stadiums now powers much more than just consumer devices; ticket scanners, scoreboards and concessionnaires use Wi-Fi to make the game day run smoothly.

While meeting ticket-holders’ connectivity needs has certainly revolutionized the typical fan experience, there are challenges to connecting consumers. As expected, the biggest hurdle facing stadiums’ ability to deliver fast and reliable access to Wi-Fi, is bottlenecking as a result of the incredibly high volume of network users, and the fact that most stadiums are already spectrum-constrained.

This situation underlines the larger global issue of how, for Wi-Fi to handle its growing user base, tapping into more spectrum is an absolute must.

In fact, newer generations of Wi-Fi are just on the horizon (reports of the emerging 802.11ax standard indicate it is built to handle the deluge of data in big venues like stadiums), but in order for them to work effectively, and ultimately solve issues such as bottlenecking, we need sufficient airwaves infrastructure.

Visit wififorward.org to learn more about the work that we’re doing to support IoT, Wi-Fi and other unlicensed spectrum-based technologies.