Chinese vendor Huawei recently provided a connectivity solution to St. Jakob Park, the largest sports stadium in Switzerland.
Huawei said it has deployed a solution with an advanced cloud management architecture, powered by Wi-Fi 6 technologies.
The stadium, which used by local soccer club Basel FC, is home to 32 shops over three different floors, as well as two restaurants.
Huawei said it had faced a number of challenges during the deployment phase of the network.
“The high density and high capacity environment of a stadium makes network construction especially challenging. Also, 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 HD audio and video playback,” Huawei said in a release.
The vendor also noted that the high number of potential end users adds layers of complexity, making operations and maintenance (O&M) potentially difficult.
Network security is also critical for public venues, with public Wi-Fi networks particularly vulnerable to attacks, Huawei added.
To tackle these challenges, Huawei offered a solution with an advanced cloud management architecture, powered by Wi-Fi 6 technologies. By wirelessly connecting to Huawei’s cloud management platform, network devices are now able to gain access to a range of tools, including Access Point (AP) management, application management, license management, network planning and optimization, device monitoring, network service configuration, and value-added services. As a result, the stadium’s technical team can handle complex network planning and O&M with ease.
To meet the high-density requirements of the project, Huawei deployed its AP7060DN access points in shops, restaurants, and parking lots, to provide indoor coverage. Outside, AP8050DN and AP8150DN access points were deployed to provide additional coverage.
To ensure security for St. Jakob Park, the Huawei USG6680 firewall integrates a broad range of functions such as a firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN), intrusion prevention, antivirus, data leak prevention, bandwidth management, anti-DDoS, URL filtering, and anti-spam.
Huawei Wi-Fi 6 also supports a large number of users. Up to 400 users can be connected to a single AP at the same time, the company said.
With remote cloud management, O&M is significantly simplified, Huawei added. Using Huawei’s cloud-based Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) planning tool, the St. Jakob Park’s technical team can shorten project delivery time to just one day instead of three, and the time needed for fault diagnosis is reduced from four hours to just 30 minutes, the vendor said.
