Huawei recently announced that it offered Wi-Fi 6 solution with an advanced cloud management architecture to St. Jakob Park, the largest Swiss sports stadium.
Located in Basel, Switzerland, St. Jakob Park has a maximum capacity approaching 40,000 and 680 parking spaces over two levels. A key host venue of the 2008 UEFA European Football Championship 2008 and the stage for the 2016 UEFA Europa League Final, the stadium is home to 32 shops over three different floors, as well as two restaurants: Restaurant UNO and the Hattrick Sports-Bar.
The high density and high capacity environment of a stadium makes network construction especially challenging. As a major venue in the city, St. Jakob Park attracts visitors from far and wide, with upwards of 60,000 people in the stands, shops, restaurants, and parking areas at any one time. On top of that, the online habits of visitors have also changed over the years. While most people used to be content simply browsing websites and social media, today people want to also be able to watch and share videos and images. In this newly demanding environment, St. Jakob Park's legacy network struggled to offer acceptable coverage to more than 30% of visitors, with no guaranteed network bandwidth for high-priority services possible, and no capacity to ensure the quality of High Definition (HD) audio and video playback, claims Huawei.
A large stadium network with such wide coverage requires expert configuration and delivery. The high number of potential end users adds layers of complexity, making Operations and Maintenance (O&M) potentially difficult, placing enormous strain on the stadium's technical team, in turn impacting operating cost.
