NFL spectacle in Munich: The technology behind the sporting event

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When the US NFL plays a football match in Munich's Allianz Arena, as it did recently with the Carolina Panthers against the New York Giants, the focus is naturally on sport and a perfect show. But there is a lot of sophisticated technology behind it. The iX editorial team had the opportunity to take a look at the challenges faced by such an IT infrastructure in the stadium.

In addition to the players and support staff, a total of three airplane containers of hardware made the journey to Munich, according to the NFL officials. The background to this is that, in addition to the WAN connection to New York, the on-premises infrastructure should also be able to operate independently if all connections fail. However, according to NFL managers, satellite backups were available for the WAN connection in addition to the fiber optic connection. It took a week to set up the additional infrastructure in Munich alone.

Data center in rolling containers

The aim of the IT managers is to keep the match operations and surrounding aspects, such as access control and stadium TV, running in order to supply the more than 70,000 spectators, even if all WAN connections fail. For this purpose, they brought along a small mobile data center in roll containers. These are used to provide central services such as DHCP, DNS, NTP and a Cisco Call Manager for on-premise IP telephony. In principle, however, stadiums such as the recently refurbished Allianz Arena operate a shared infrastructure, which is also based on the existing infrastructure on site, but with its own servers, including the services and applications operated on them, as well as end devices.

The campus network was built on 50 of the well-known multi-gigabit-capable Catalyst 9300 switches. Among other things, these transport the UHD TV images so that they can later be transmitted to the USA. The cameras also had to be reconsidered in terms of network technology, as the camera positions required for the NFL are completely different to those required for soccer, which is traditionally played in the Allianz Arena. It was therefore not possible to use this infrastructure.

Private LTE network

Around 1,500 WiFi 6 access points were available in and around the Allianz Arena. An upgrade to WiFi 7 was already taken into account in the design. Anyone assuming that there are classic access points with omnidirectional antennas is wrong. We identified directional patch antennas in the indoor and outdoor areas of the stadium in order to limit the lateral coverage area and not to supply too many parallel users on one access point.

Those responsible spoke of 14,000 WLAN end devices active in parallel. According to statements made in the interview, the guest WLAN alone sometimes generates loads of up to 20 Gbit/s in the stadium. In the USA, however, even more users are active in the WLAN at the same time. The NFL even operates a private LTE network for its own purposes so that it does not have to rely on a shared Wi-Fi infrastructure for mission-critical services. A dedicated Wi-Fi network is also operated for the coaches' tablets.

On the sidelines, there were blue trolleys with tablets for the referees to analyze unclear game situations via VR/AR. These should also enable real-time consultation with NFL personnel in the USA, for which IP telephones are also located in the trolleys. These are located in the so-called GameDay Central Command Center in New York, which means that the WAN connections play an important role despite the self-sufficiency. Cisco Catalyst 8000 series routers are used there as the hardware platform.

Defense must also be in place in IT

As in other areas of IT, security is one of the biggest challenges. During the interview, the NFL managers explained that around 39,000 security-related events occurred during the Super Bowl and around 354,000 connections were blocked. Thanks to its partnership with Cisco, the NFL also relies on technology from the company –, namely secure firewalls (formerly Firepower Threat Defense), Umbrella as a DNS security service and the XDR service.

Data protection is also a relevant challenge when the NFL travels. In countries that are subject to the GDPR, visitor tracking is not permitted and must therefore be deactivated. And last but not least, frequency allocation for the private LTE network is another hurdle, as this has to be agreed with the relevant regulatory authorities. However, according to the NFL, this is no more complex in Germany than in other countries.

(mki)