McLane Stadium Fills the Stands with New Network, App Implementation at Baylor University

If you build it, they will come – and connect.

This was the case for Baylor University – aside from a building a brand new stadium (McLane Stadium), the school also implemented a high-density wireless network and apps to boost fans’ experience.

Pattie Orr, Vice President for IT and Dean of University Libraries at Baylor University says one of the stadium’s main goals was to prepare for the boom of mobile device consumption among students.

“One of the things we knew was that our fans are very in love with their mobile devices,” she says. “They’re heavily used on our campus. In the university setting, Wi-Fi and mobile devices are part of life. We tried to plan for what we thought the future was going to bring and we thought that future was going to be all about mobile devices – and it certainly has been.”

Orr says the best way the stadium could support the influx of mobile device usage was to load it with high-density Wi-Fi and team up with Extreme Networks.

Extreme Networks not only helped implement the network, but also helped plan and design the installation. They also served as a Wi-Fi coach for Baylor’s IT staff.

Orr says the university chose Extreme Networks as a solution provider because they based their work off of their other successful installations, including the Wi-Fi network deployed in Gillette Stadium for New England Patriots fans.

“We kept coming back to Extreme because we felt that they really hit the mark – part of that is due to their antennas, which are specially designed, and their strategy to cover a large space in a large venue, and they had a proven record that they had done it,” she says. “We also love their tools. They made it easy for my management team to manage the console…[and] know how our bandwidth is being used to make it the best experience possible.”

Mike Leibovitz, Director of Mobility and Applications at Extreme Networks says Baylor was a unique installation for the company.

He says because McLane Stadium was a new building, his team had more network luxuries to indulge in.

He also says this does not happen when networks are retrofitted into older spaces.

“From a top level, providing hi-density Wi-Fi is more than just the Wi-Fi itself,” Leibovitz says. “It’s not just about the radio frequency and Wi-Fi signaling, there’s a lot of things that happened behind the access points in terms of the wired infrastructure, being able to carry that traffic down that network out to the internet and the software elements that bring the system to life. The network management tools make it easy to deploy and manage on game days, the BYOD capabilities. You can’t have a very good experience if you can’t get your device on the network and do that in a simple, consistent manner.”

Orr says Extreme Networks’ ideas for Wi-Fi implementation contributed to the new network’s success.

“It’s not just about can we turn this up and have a bunch of wires going ; it’s will the fans all have a good experience?” she says. “We wanted to make sure every person in that stadium could connect to this Wi-Fi successfully. One of the things I think contributed to our success was that idea that came from the Extreme folks, and they brought in their trainers and trained their management team about how to implement that with our fan base.”

Through the successful network, Orr says Baylor is connecting to fans through apps, especially the Baylor In-Game App, by YinzCam.

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