Data network answers Broncos' need for speed in digital era.

• Author: Schely, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS BIZ

THERE'S A TRENDY TECH MOVE happening in professional football these days: Shotgun formations and cornerback blitzes are sharing the field with cloud-based video and ultra-fast Ethernet connections.

It's a measure driven by a familiar football hunger: the need for speed. The vast consumer embrace of smartphones, the reliance on instant video for scouting, and the transformation of stadiums to high-tech entertainment theaters demands more bandwidth than old-school telecom systems could supply.

That's why teams, including the Denver Broncos, have ripped out legacy data networks and replaced them with state-of-the-art infrastructures optimized for the digital era.

Comcast's 2013 deal with the Broncos to supply high-capacity data networking capability exemplifies the modernization trend. Comcast supplies a pair of high-speed, dedicated network links. A private fiber network connects the team's Dove Valley training and office facilities to Sports Authority Field. A second network floods the stadium with high-speed Internet access, connecting Sports Authority's larger-than-life scoreboard, 1,000 high-definition TV sets and an expanded Wi-Fi network to the Internet.

The Wi-Fi component is increasingly important as fans come to the stadium armed with smartphones, intent on sharing game-day images and messages across social media platforms or interacting with the team's own digital app. Because Wi-Fi networks can be subdivided into multiple serving zones, they're able to scale more reliably than cellular data networks in high-usage environments. That means Wi-Fi is a better bet to survive a digital version of Rocky Mountain Thunder: a strain on cellular networks caused by too much concurrent demand from too many users. More than once, I've been at the stadium when AT&T's cellular network has been too bogged down under the weight of thousands of simultaneous data requests, leaving my iPhone to display only the...