Chase Center is a live entertainment venue in San Francisco and home to the NBA’s Golden State Warriors. It hosts an average of more than 18,000 fans for each home game. The Warriors, similar to other professional sports teams, want to deliver the best fan experience for their fans, especially when it comes to connectivity, which is becoming a must-have for fans as part of their willingness to attend events.
During the 2022 NBA Finals, the venue saw a peak of over 10,000 devices connected with 3.8 TB in use. It peaked higher for the 2022 NCAA Western Regional with over 4.05 TB in use. On top of that, the venue is home to 100,000 square feet of restaurant and retail businesses and 580,000 square feet of office space across two buildings, better known as Thrive City.
To deliver more reliable connectivity and further immerse its fans and other venue guests, the seven-time NBA champion Warriors deployed HPE’s Aruba Wi-Fi 6E access points throughout Chase Center.
Chase Center’s adoption of Aruba’s Wi-Fi 6E solution set includes Aruba’s patented ultra tri-band filtering that dynamically adjusts the available channels to eliminate signal interference and performance degradation. Wi-Fi 6E provides more capacity in the 6 GHz band, which solves connection and congestion issues and wider channels up to 160 MHz, which are ideal for high-definition video and VR.
Additionally, the APs are IoT-ready with integrated BLE and Zigbee support to make it easier to deploy and manage IoT, including asset tracking, security solutions and sensors.
“With Wi-Fi 6E, the Warriors and Chase Center can take advantage of the increased capacity, wider channels and significantly reduced signal interference of 6 GHz and the location-aware infrastructure of Open Locate,” said Stuart Strickland, wireless chief technology officer at Aruba.
What does this mean for the fans? The Wi-Fi 6E APs will increase bandwidth, which will enable high-bandwidth activities such as streaming and uploading content during events. The APs will also ensure ample bandwidth for arena operations, IoT implementations and experience-related services such as in-seat ordering and contactless payment.
More than 250 active Wi-Fi 6E APs are active in the bowl seating section of the arena – they went live with the venue’s Alicia Keys concert in September.
“With the addition of Wi-Fi 6E access points in the arena bowl, we can provide fans a more immersive experience that we believe is unmatched by any other professional sporting venue,” said Warriors President and Chief Operating Officer Brandon Schneider.
The deployment in Chase Center is part of Aruba’s commitment to providing modern, immersive experiences for fans and guests.
Edited by
Erik Linask
