Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky. now features a headend equipment room to hold all of its technology infrastructure.
When the 141st running of the Kentucky Derby takes place on May 2 at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., more than 160,000 fans will invade the venerable venue. Most of those will be using the social media applications on their smart phones to capture and share with friends their experience in The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports.
To put the massive bandwidth numbers in perspective, consider that fans at a National Football League stadium that seats 80,000 share their social media experiences over the course of a three-hour game. Double the attendance figure and condense three hours into two minutes and you have the challenge that is present at the Kentucky Derby, where the necessity of advanced technology intersects with the vintage history and tradition of a track that held its first race in 1875.
“Everybody at Churchill Downs is videoing and recording,” said Christos Karmis, president of Newport Beach, Calif.-based Mobilitie, a wireless solution provider that works with venues and wireless carriers to ensure customers are better connected and installed wireless technology for the Kentucky Derby. “Everybody wants to remember they were there for the Derby.”
DAS, or distributed antenna system, is a network with antennas distributed throughout the facility which, according to Karmis in the case of Churchill Downs, numbers 253 and meets the ever-increasing wireless demands on race day. Mobilitie installed the system in 2013 and updated it last year to expand the coverage area while increasing the overall capacity of the network.
The DAS antennas are a smaller broadcast area than a traditional cell tower and divide the venue into different sectors or zones that cover a couple thousand people. Churchill Downs is one of the largest DAS networks in the country with more than 50 different zones created just within the venue. A headend equipment room on-site houses all the hardware that powers the network and where the carriers have their radios plugged in. Since the DAS network helps fans share photos, access apps, text, make calls and more, there is currently not the ability for venues to partner with sponsors to make money from ads or collect attendee information that would apply to a Wi-Fi system.
“We started looking at the need for this technology almost six years ago,” said Ryan Jordan, GM of Churchill Downs. “It wasn’t only about improving the fan experience but, at that time, data wasn’t as much of an issue as actually just making a phone call.”
Jordan said that Mobilitie brought several advantages to the table, including offering a network that was not dedicated to one specific carrier. AT&T and Verizon customers had coverage at last year’s “Run for the Roses” while Jordan and Karmis expect T-Mobile and Sprint to come on board this year.
Mobilitie installed the infrastructure at no cost and works with the various carriers directly to be compensated.
“Mobilitie provides end-to-end service by designing, building, operating and maintaining a property’s wireless infrastructure,” he said. “We then provide access to the neutral host DAS to all major carriers.”
Karmis said the arrangement is one that can be duplicated at any venue anywhere. “Our business model provides the venue with the wireless infrastructure that they need without having to worry about the cost to manage the system,” he said.
Churchill Downs’ seating configuration changes annually and occupies 1.6 million square feet of space spread out linearly. As Jordan noted, the venue is not a dome or a bowl where all the seats are around one focal point. The venue is stretched around a one-mile racetrack with lots of concrete and steel in a very old building that posed a challenge for Mobilitie as it installed the DAS system.
The infield of the track alone occupies 25 to 30 acres and is an area that Mobilitie upgraded last year with additional antennas.
“The demographic of the infield is typically a little younger with college age crowds using their phones maybe more frequently,” Jordan said. “I had to look specifically at the amount of data coming out of the infield.”
If technology upgrades are not part of a venue’s budget, they should be. While tech-savvy guests expect to engage in social media while at events to show and tell their friends where they are and what they are seeing, venues get unquantifiable exposure from all the social media their guests are sharing with the outside world.
“Venues should want people to be able to upload to all the social media because it’s essentially free marketing,” Karmis said. “I think for venues across the country they really want to make sure that the wireless networks can support because once people leave the venue they are significantly less likely to upload a lot of that stuff versus while they’re there.”
That is especially true for the Kentucky Derby, which is but one race on a day when there are a dozen other races and people are roaming the grounds.
“There’s probably about 30 minutes of live sporting events that go on in about a 12-hour day,” Jordan said. “That leaves a lot of time where people are doing other things, taking in all the other things that make the Kentucky Derby so special, whether it’s the fashion, people-watching, wagering, talking to friends, seeing people dressed up, everything that makes the Derby the Derby. People are looking for things to do to fill that time and part of the time they’re on their phone taking pictures of all those experiences and sharing them.”
Then comes The Greatest Two Minutes in Sports, and the action is as frenzied on phones as it is on the track.
Interviewed for this story: Ryan Jordan, (502) 636-4400; Christos Karmis, (877) 999-7070