Case study
A football stadium in Germany, 30,000+ seats.
Survey, design, installation and testing,
with 450+ access points.
Service pack/Commercial in Confidence
Contents
The project
Optronix surveyed, designed, installed and tested the wireless network for a football stadium in Germany seating more than 30,000. The requirement was full coverage of the venue, with every user able to get on at the same time.
Client identifiers withheld. The five facts above are the project's. Every other number in this deck is a design model or a worked example, labelled where it appears.
Illustration. One dot for each of the 450+ access points, across the bowl, concourses, hospitality, media, back of house and fan zone.
The environment
Section through one stand, drawn for this deck. The body-loss figures and the distances are typical values used in RF modelling for a bowl of this size, not measurements from the venue.
The venue
Illustration of a bowl of this size. Zone layouts and the coverage approach for each are worked engineering, not the venue's drawings.
Matchday
A design model of a matchday. The bars show where the load sits at each point, not measured traffic from the venue.
Capacity
Design model. Take-up assumed at 45% of attendance at kick-off and 60% at the half-time peak, about 50 devices per access point as a comfortable load, and a further 25% of the bowl count for everything that is not a seat. Switch ports are one per access point plus 10% spare, bought in 48-port units. PoE load is 25.5 W a radio, with 15% added for the mounts that carry a second device.
Placement
Antenna patterns drawn to show the shape of each cell, not a manufacturer's pattern. Most bowls end up using both.
Coverage
Illustrative model at 5 GHz, with -67 dBm as the design target. The predicted map is what a design produces before anyone visits site; the validated map is what a post-install survey measures. These figures come from the model on this page, not from the venue's survey.
Channel plan
A bowl has no walls to reuse a channel behind, so every radio hears every other one and reuse distance is the whole design. In Europe most 5 GHz channels also carry DFS, so the plan has to survive a radio being moved mid-fixture.
Eight of the twelve channels carry DFS. A radar detection takes a radio off air for the availability check, so the busiest blocks sit on the non-DFS core, the channel list is pre-cleared from the spectrum capture taken on site, and a radio that has to move stays inside its own reuse group.
Illustrative model, on the access point layout from the previous slide. Overlap is counted where a second access point on the same channel is heard within 10 dB of the serving one.
The programme
The fixture list is the programme. Work stops before a fixture and does not restart until the ground is released back.
Anything that can be built off site is built off site. Firmware, configuration and labelling are done before the kit reaches the ground, so a window is spent putting radios up.
Roof steel access is batched. The same permits and the same rope teams, in as few windows as possible.
The bowl is handed back clean every shift. No tools, no drums and no trip hazards in a public space.
An example programme for a venue of this size, showing how the work is shaped around the fixture list. Dates and fixture spacing are illustrative.
Testing
Every tier, concourse, box and corridor walked after the install, and the measured result compared against the predictive model row by row.
The validation survey is walked in an empty bowl. The network is watched through a live fixture as well, so the design assumptions are checked against what a full house does.
The list on each card is what is measured. The shapes in the drawings are models of a matchday, not the venue's results.
Turnkey
Optronix designed and provisioned the full turnkey solution. One contract from the first predictive model to the handover pack, with the same engineers on it throughout.
Predictive model built from the drawings, then an on-site RF survey of the empty bowl.
Access point placement, antenna selection, the channel and power plan across 5 GHz and 6 GHz, and the capacity model behind them.
Radios, antennas, mounts, cable and containment bought and scheduled against the access windows.
Every access point built, firmware matched, named and labelled before it reached the ground.
Containment, fibre to the bowl comms rooms and Cat6A to every position, tested and certified. PoE class set per mount, and the switch stacks sized from the same schedule.
Access points mounted, aimed, patched and powered, inside the windows between fixtures.
Controller build, network and authentication, channel plan applied and power set per zone.
Validation survey, as-builts, access point schedule, asset register and every test result.
Handover
| AP | Zone | Position | Mount | Antenna | 5 GHz | 2.4 GHz | Tx, cond. | Test |
|---|
Example page, drawn for this deck to show the format, not the venue's schedule. Power is conducted at the radio, before antenna gain, and 2.4 GHz is enabled on a defined subset of mounts.
Results
A football stadium in Germany, covered as one venue and designed for a full house.
Surveyed, designed, installed and tested by Optronix, across the bowl and everything behind it.
The requirement was coverage everywhere, and that is what was designed, installed and tested.
Designed so that all users can be on the network together, which is what a full house at half time asks for.
Client identifiers withheld. The four results above and the scope beneath them are the project's. Every other number in this deck is a design model or a worked example, labelled where it appears.
Why Optronix
A stadium is a harder room than an office, but it is not a different job. The survey, the model, the channel plan, the cabling standard and the validation report are the same ones we use on every floor.
Predictive and physical RF surveys using Ekahau, from the first model built off the drawings to the validation survey and the heatmap report at the end.
Containment, fibre to every comms room and Cat6A to every position, installed, tested and documented to the same standard as our data centre work, because the cable is what you cannot get back to on a matchday.
PoE class set per mount type, switch stacks sized on the fully loaded budget rather than the port count, uplinks dual-homed to the core on diverse routes, and the comms rooms on a protected supply.
Our engineers have worked for Microsoft, Google, AWS, JPMorgan Chase and Jane Street, among others, and they bring the same method to a stand full of people.
Our engineers
Related decks
This deck is one venue. The service decks behind it carry the method, the standards and the rest of the work, and the case studies deck carries the other projects.
Next step
Plans, a seating count and the fixture list are enough to start. We will come back with a predictive model, a plan for the survey on site and an outline scope.
Data Centre Lifecycle Experts