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Behind-The-Scenes Superbowl Tech

Posted by samzenpus on from the shiny-new-toys dept.

jfruhlinger writes "You might be a hardcore sports fan or might think of jocks with disdain, but if you're a geek you'll probably be intrigued by the tech behind the brand-new stadium where this weekend's Superbowl will be played. 84 Cisco access points, 70 wiring closets, 40,000 wired ports, 8 million feet of Ethernet cabling, 260 miles of fiber, 100 TB of storage — all on a single network."

23 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. 884 APs by zn0k · · Score: 3, Informative

    There are 884 APs, not 84 as the summary claims.

    84 APs would be pitiful. Cisco recommends no more than 35 users per AP radio. You can probably push that up to 50 for public access WiFi, maybe - if you're thin stretched - a little bit more as long as many clients are 5GHz devices. Given that many APs will be back of the house and not accessible to the public you wouldn't be able to serve more than one to two thousand users on 84.

    1. Re:884 APs by camperdave · · Score: 2

      Laptop? It's 2011 dude. Cell phones are WiFi capable these days. People will be watching the game on their phones while they stand in line for food, or are sitting in the bathroom stalls getting rid of the food.

      --
      When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
    2. Re:884 APs by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Gee, I bet it will be very exciting to see which group of overpaid multimillionaire jocks will win a game that doesn't fucking matter! I'm on the edge of my seat really.

      God damn. If only the scientists and doctors who improve our quality of life and bring new meaning to our existence got half this much attention. What a fucking waste. If space aliens exist and they find us, they might be obligated to sterilize this planet in case our madness and our pathological priorities are contagious.

      This is what sanity would look like: after all the poor are fed, clothed and sheltered, after all disease is eradicated, after all tyrants are ousted from power ... then and only then does it make sense to put our excess resources towards worrying about which group of overpaid athletes can most efficiently chase a football. We are far from sanity, folks. We don't have time for it. We're too busy worrying about money, power, money, power, wealth, coercion, money, power, MONEY AND GODDAMNED POWER that's all we care about and have time for. The jocks and their fans, the jock-sniffers, well they made a huge market out of something that doesn't fucking amount to anything, and that's what matters.

      Ever wonder why state and municipal governments will spend millions of dollars to build and maintain stadiums? Bread-and-circus, or at least that's what the Romans called it...

    3. Re:884 APs by adolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Er, uh. I'm not much of a football fan -- at all -- but all I can think is this:

      They're at the Superbowl. The fucking SUPERBOWL. Have they nothing more important to do than fuck with their iPhones, wait in huge lines for bad and expensive food, and then wait in huger lines to recycle the food, while wasting similarly huge amounts of time shuffling to and from their designated seat?

      Couldn't they just eat and shit before they show up at the stadium, so they might actually be able to ... you know ... watch the game that they paid/traveled to see?

      No?

      Then I guess it's truly an American sport after all*.

      *: Yep. And I'm an American, always have been, always will be.

      --
      Kid-proof tablet..
  2. Mixed Units... by cmseagle · · Score: 2

    8 million feet = 1,515 miles, in case anyone was wondering.

    1. Re:Mixed Units... by mooingyak · · Score: 5, Funny

      8 million feet = somewhere between 4-8 million people.

      --
      William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
    2. Re:Mixed Units... by treeves · · Score: 2

      "...somewhere between 4-8 million..."

      Based on the numbers here: http://www.amputee-coalition.org/fact_sheets/amp_stats_cause.html
        I'd estimate that the figure would be *much* closer to 4 million than to 8 million.
        In fact, you could have said "between 4 million and 4,020,100". (4 million * 200/199)

      --
      ...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
  3. Hey, look! by msauve · · Score: 5, Funny

    A Cisco ad!

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
    1. Re:Hey, look! by zn0k · · Score: 2

      That's not entirely fair, either. You don't have 884 stand alone APs deployed, you have them centrally controlled either via an appliance (Cisco's WLC/WCS) or via cloud based controllers hosted on the APs themselves.

      Sure, there's a lot more than Cisco out there, but most gear than can handle balancing power and channel assignments to counter interference for that large a wireless network is a heck of a lot more expensive than a cheap, off the shelf AP. And there are few non-brand manufacturers out there than can handle a deployment that large, though there's a heck of a lot more brands than Cisco.

  4. No cheerleaders? by schwit1 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This weekend's Super Bowl clash between the Green Bay Packers and Pittsburgh Steelers will be the first in the game's 45 year history sans cheerleaders.

    1. Re:No cheerleaders? by Bratmon · · Score: 3, Funny

      You know nobody will click an outbound link to that website.

  5. The storage is cool by afidel · · Score: 3, Informative

    One thing I found interesting is that the Cleveland Indians are a big user of storage. When the player is in the hole (second next to bat) they can bring up any and every pitch they have ever received from the current pitcher and likely relievers. That means the metadata has to be fast enough to find the pitches and then the streaming media server has to be able to serve it up basically instantly if they want to view a couple of different at bats in the time they are in the hole, pretty cool IMHO.

    --
    There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    1. Re:The storage is cool by swb · · Score: 2

      There was an article in the NY Times about Major League Baseball doing this for EVERY CAMERA ANGLE for EVERY PLAY, with full metadata for everything happening, including what crazy shit people write on signs.

      Apparently it was all in queryable database so that you could find out, say, what happened when Batter X faced Pitcher Y on Team Z in Stadium 2.

    2. Re:The storage is cool by afidel · · Score: 2

      Yeah, found the article, it's interesting that they talk about the pitch thing like it's a future possibility, talking to the guys from the Indians they were already doing it in production this year.

      --
      There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
    3. Re:The storage is cool by fishbowl · · Score: 2

      I have a friend who runs the booth equipment that does titles on sports events, with the NFL games being the biggest gig.
      The thing that strikes me about it is how low-tech the process really is. The stats data is available for pretty much the entire history of the league, and they can pull up whatever they want, but beyond that it's really simple, a director says what they want in the headset and the operator looks it up, and it gets displayed in whatever format was defined in the couple of hours they have to set up before the game. It's a required skill for the operators to be able to anticipate what's going to be requested, and mistakes just plain don't happen, if you want to ever sit in that chair again.

      It really is pretty cool to watch, but it's also very obvious that it's a stressful job, the bosses are uniformly complete a-holes, and it's such a specialized skillset that it doesn't translate to *any* other profession.

      --
      -fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
  6. It's all good stuff by demonlapin · · Score: 2

    A friend of mine from high school was a sociology major at Tulane. However, he did work in the computer labs as his work-study job. Senior year rolls around, and the Super Bowl comes to New Orleans. The NFL asked the Tulane computer labs for a few student assistants who they could hire to help out. He ends up impressing the guys enough that they offer him a job doing some basic IT work for them - at NFL headquarters in Manhattan.

    He ended up parlaying that into a job with the WHO, and then moved to Geneva, where he's been ever since. Probably the most successful sociology grad they've had in a long time.

  7. NFL database tech by TheCodeFoundry · · Score: 2

    I, for one, would love to see the UI that the techs use to run the queries on obscure NFL statistics during games.

    "This is only the second time 3 consecutive 3rd down conversions have occurred between 11-3 rated AFC teams in outdoor stadiums with 2nd string quarterbacks using a QB option play"

    And they are able to run these queries quickly...usually within the time of the next play. How do they do that? Is it raw TSQL styled queries or do they have some kind of UI for that?

  8. IPv4 + football by ben_kelley · · Score: 2

    the stadium has thousands more TVs, each with its own IP address

    The truth is out: Football is driving the IPv4 address space exhaustion!

  9. Re:A single network? by mug+funky · · Score: 2

    remember what management get paid...

  10. Re:100 TB is impressive how? by sdguero · · Score: 2

    That was my thought. If the NIC is the limiting factor (likely if you are streaming video) then there is no need for faster, hotter, less efficient hard drives (which is very similar to the Cobra vs Camry comparison:).

    Of course, people like to have the bad ass hardware, myself included, and it is hard to ask for a six figure salary when you are managing $10k worth of equipment...

  11. Not Brand New by Wyatt+Earp · · Score: 2

    It was opened in May of 2009, has had two full pre-seasons and regular seasons of Football, concerts, boxing matches, the NBA All Star Game already.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cowboys_Stadium#Major_events

  12. Re:884 access points, not 84 by PopeRatzo · · Score: 2

    Pretty cool, but I think I'll still wait until the game's over so I can watch the commercials online in one go!

    It'll be more entertaining to watch you act them out for us at the water cooler on Monday.

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  13. Re:A single network? by Archangel+Michael · · Score: 2

    Same network, not the same network.It depends on how you define "network".

    40,000 ports, PLUS 884 Access points each capable of 20-50 connections each all on the same configurable network infrastructure = one network. OR you can look at collision(broadcast) domains and understand that 40,000 connections alone would be impossible, and realize that they use VLANS and other routing protocols to segment the collision domains logically (routing, security, public, private, command/control etc).

    I understood what the article meant by "one" network. It meant the former, not the latter.

    The average joe, walking around the stadium with their Droid or iPhone and not once drop a connection would consider it "one network", the same way they view AT&T Cell service is "one network". They don't give a shit about VLANS, Collision Domains, Routing protocols, Switches and Network Gear. Really, they don't. It is "one network" to them, and THAT is the way it is supposed to be.

    And we can geek out behind the scenes with all the blinky shiny geek toys.

    --
    Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.