The San Diego Padres have teamed with Boingo Wireless to deploy a small CBRS network at Petco Park, providing back-of-house coverage to support concessions and ticketing transactions at the Gallagher Square “community gathering space” that is adjacent to the baseball stadium.
Though it’s just a small network — meant to provide connectivity for Apple iPad Pros that stadium staff will use to conduct concessions payments and mobile-ticketing operations — today’s announcement is significant as being the first commercial, non-test deployment of the Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) spectrum we’ve heard of in a stadium situation. Sports stadiums are a market that has long been seen as a fertile ground for CBRS’s selling points, namely its ability to support private, LTE-based networks with the deployment simplicity of Wi-Fi but the security and mobility characteristics of cellular.
While Boingo would not reveal all specifics of the network that is currently live, such as the number of antennas needed or the number of staffers who will use the network, it did say that the deployment uses a mix of networking gear, software and services from a range of CBRS-focused vendors, including Federated Wireless, a company built to provide the tricky back-end spectrum-sharing services that make CBRS unique. Other vendors involved in the deployment are Cisco, and CommScope/Ruckus, according to Boingo.
And while the Boingo press release touts the network as being “5G-ready,” it is almost certainly using 4G LTE technology right now. According to Boingo the Petco Park network is using unlicensed CBRS spectrum.
(If you are new to the shared-spectrum game, the 150 MHz of CBRS spectrum at the 3.6 GHz range is a unique set of airwaves that is notable for supporting both licensed and unlicensed use cases. If you need a primer I highly suggest the CBRS report we did a couple years ago about how CBRS can support venues.)
Though we’ve never been there, the Gallagher Square area seems to be a place where concerts and other gatherings can be held. According to Boingo the area has a capacity of about 13,000 for concerts, which from the press photos we’ve been given seem mainly to be lawn-seating type events. That makes CBRS a good candidate for providing connectivity over the area, since CBRS has a longer range than Wi-Fi. Using it for concessions and ticketing operations is one of the main possible use cases we identified in our report, since it keeps transactions off the public Wi-FI network.
Several other sports and venues have tested CBRS in the past, including the Los Angeles Angels, NASCAR and the PGA. The NFL has also been rumored as a big potential CBRS candidate, and has previously filed with the FCC with the desire to test the service. The NFL is believed to be most interested in CBRS as a technology for sideline radio communications.
