Ashton Gate Stadium
Ashton Gate Stadium (AGS) is the largest stadium in South-West England with a 27,000 capacity and home to Bristol City FC and Bristol Bears RFC. It has state-of-the-art conference facilities and is a major exhibition and hospitality venue.
AGS regularly hosts summer concerts featuring artists like Rod Stewart, Take That, Muse and the Spice Girls, welcoming several hundreds of thousands of fans during the concert season. Stadium capacity as a concert can reach well over 34,000.
In summary, AGS is a 24/7 multi-purpose venue with a complex network and service environment supporting sports, hospitality, conferences and large-scale events.
Network complexity
AGS is a complex enterprise environment. The stadium’s public Wi-Fi network alone is a multi-vendor network with more than 300 network elements and is configured to support high crowd densities. Access points from two vendors have been deployed in different areas: A high-density Wi-Fi installation from Ruckus has been deployed in the bowl whereas Edgecore access points have been installed in hospitality areas and concourse. The ability to pick-and-mix different Wi-Fi vendors for specific areas, enables better efficiency and up to 30% CAPEX reduction.
The network also supports a huge number of services from electronic point-of-sale (ePOS) terminals in bars and concessions to CCTV surveillance to electronic turnstiles and IPTV distribution systems.
The wide variety of events held at AGS requires a flexible network that can be reconfigured quickly in a vendor-agnostic way.
Business agility delivered
Zeetta deployed NetOS® to Ashton Gate Stadium in 2018. This was a large-scale demonstration of the capability and scalability of Zeetta’s technology to manage a complex network infrastructure in a vendor-agnostic way that reduces CAPEX and OPEX and provides improved business agility without loss of performance. NetOS® provided a single-pane-of-glass visibility and control of AGS’ complex network including the two populations of Wi-Fi systems, CCTV, IPTV displays and other IoT devices and sub-systems.
Zeetta’s NetOS® deployment in AGS delivered intelligent network automation in a complex enterprise networks supporting multiple mission-critical and business-critical services running in areas with high crowd density and demand for digital connectivity.
As AGS’ chairman Martin Griffiths, put it: “Sports stadia across the globe struggle with connectivity and real-time evaluation of data. I believe we are just scratching the surface of what this NetOS platform can deliver.“
