Networking provider Extreme Networks Inc. today announced it’s now the official WiFi solutions provider for Major League Baseball.

Beginning with the 2021 season, 16 MLB ballparks will use Extreme WiFi 6 and WiFi analytics to improve the fan and media experience, with more installations scheduled through 2026. The deal also extends to MLB’s Jackie Robinson Training Complex in Vero Beach, Florida. MLB is adding Extreme to big technology partners such as Google LLC and T-Mobile US Inc.

For its part, Extreme Networks currently has relationships with NASCAR and the NFL. In fact, with the latter, Extreme just finished up its eighth consecutive Super Bowl, where its WiFi analytics are used to provide granular analysis of how the network was used by fans. These two relationships were established by Extreme Chief Operating Officer Norman Rice as well as its sports practice lead, John Brams.

The MLB win appears to be a joint effort between Rice and Brams together with incoming Chief Marketing Officer Wes Durow, whose sports experiences date back to his Avaya days when he brought that company into the 2010 Olympics. More recently, Durow established a relationship between MLB and Mitel, as well as a handful of European soccer teams such as Liverpool, Tottenham and Wolfsburg.

Anyone who watches MLB has probably seen the Mitel logo on the replay official or on the phones when the manager makes the call to the bullpen. Extreme already has strong relationships with a number of MLB teams as well, such as the Chicago Cubs and the Baltimore Orioles.

My favorite baseball team, the Boston Red Sox, will be the first MLB team to roll out Extreme Networks. I recently had a chance to talk to Red Sox Chief Information Officer Brian Shield about the deployment. I asked him about the importance of good-quality, in-stadium WiFi and he told me that it’s a top initiative for MLB, clubs and all major sporting venues.

“For fan experience, it’s a game-changer, because so many of the rapidly growing fan amenities in stadiums rely on high-performing WiFi,” he said. “In the past, we were limited in the breadth of things we could do due to the prior generation of WiFi and inconsistent mobile bandwidth across the ballpark.”

Shield then described 2021 as a season of many new digital firsts. “We are starting to look at delivering more services over mobile devices like mobile food ordering in select locations, 100% digital ticketing and many other fan services,” he said. “These evolving fan amenities simply don’t work if fans experience performance delays due to WiFi limitations.”

The Red Sox are the first team as they had already settled on Extreme Networks as their WiFi provider, even before MLB had finalized its decision. Shield shared that they learned a fair bit about Extreme from the Patriots, which had selected them years before. Just after Extreme won that business, I attended a media event at Gillette Stadium and Jonathan Kraft, president of the Pats said Extreme was the only vendor that would guarantee the performance of the network would remain high when the stadium was full of fans.

I’ve talked to many WiFi vendors about in stadium WiFi and many won’t touch that business because the risk is high. Providing a great WiFi experience is easy when there is just a handful of people but anyone who has attended a conference knows how poor it can get when you have just a few thousand peopletTweeting, Instagramming and Facebooking.

Now extrapolate that 10-fold and that’s what the stadium experience is like. Extreme built its solution with these demanding environments in mind and has been rewarded with winning many sports leagues as well as colleges and other high-performance venues.

More broadly, MLB will use the Extreme solution to accomplish the following:

• Enhanced fan and staff experience. The Extreme WiFi-enabled venues will give fans and staff and faster, more efficient WiFi experience to support bandwidth intensive apps during the game. Staff members will benefit from better connectivity leading to better analytics and telemetry and insights that can further improve guest support.
• Improved reporting and media experience. The faster network will support the high bandwidth needs of the media and broadcast analysts so they can quickly send and receive multimedia updates during the games.
• Advancing women in sports technology. MLB and Extreme will seek to identify shared programs and co-create events to champion and celebrate women leading the advancement of technology and sports. Both MLB and Extreme have reiterated their commitment to advancing equality and inclusion in sports and tech.

Although this partnership is about delivering WiFi in stadiums, it’s a good lesson for all network professionals and business leaders. Good-quality WiFi should be considered a foundational technology for digital transformation. Whether it’s in a stadium for fans, a store for customers, a classroom for students, patients at a hospital or other use cases, more and more capabilities are driven over wireless.

Bad WiFi means bad experience, which equates to digital initiatives failing. Great WiFi leads to high engagement and faster return on digital investment.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.

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