Cincy Tennis stages the Western & Southern Open, a world-class professional tennis tournament held every year at Cincinnati's Lindner Family Tennis Center. The nine-day event draws around 199,000 attendees to a 20-acre outdoor venue, with peak daily attendance calculated at 28,000. Alongside the on-court action, the organization runs a Cincy Tennis mobile app and wanted to keep fans connected and engaged while on site.

Cincy Tennis wanted to enhance the fan experience at the Western & Southern Open with Wi-Fi that attendees could use from anywhere on the grounds. Event planners also wanted to drive fans to the Cincy Tennis mobile app, gain insights into how attendees used the venue, and keep people connected while on site.

Installing wireless internet across a large outdoor venue is no small undertaking. The 20-acre grounds are mostly concrete, and the network had to handle the high-density traffic patterns of a tournament that draws about 28,000 people on a peak day, without fans losing their connection as they walked from court to court.

The physical build was a challenge in its own right. Access points had to be mounted and cabled across the expansive site, and cable paths had to be established through a venue with few natural routes, all in a way that was cost-effective and did not detract from the look of the grounds.

Powernet's engineering team worked with Cincy Tennis to understand its goals and developed a unique installation plan. Engineers calculated how many users the network had to sustain and how many devices each access point could support. Assuming around 7,500 fans on the Wi-Fi each day, with each access point able to serve up to 500 devices, the design could support an estimated 40,000 devices at once.

Powernet installed 84 Ruckus access points, all using the new 802.11ac standard to provide the fastest Wi-Fi for every user, making the venue the first all-802.11ac Ruckus stadium. The access points were controlled through Ruckus Virtual SmartZone (VSZ), a cloud-managed platform that let engineers see how many attendees were on each access point, which service set identifiers needed to be broadcast, and how attendees moved through the venue. Existing vertical assets were used as mounting points wherever possible to minimize custom fabrication, and 23,000 feet of cabling was installed cost-effectively and unobtrusively.

For attendee insights, Ruckus SPoT (Smart Positioning Technology) fed location data into Powernet's Beyond Wi-Fi analytics portal, which captured demographic, social and location-based information. During the tournament, Powernet used Beyond Wi-Fi heat maps to see that a food-court hotspot each morning was the venue's sole coffee vendor, and found that more than 35 percent of fans who logged in through Facebook liked coffee.

• 84 Ruckus 802.11ac access points installed, the first all-AC Ruckus stadium, as a fully cloud-managed network
• Nearly 100% uptime over the nine-day event, with at least 40 Mbps down and up on the busiest day
• Average network speed of 30.37 Mbps while handling 1,500 gigabytes of data
• More than 16,000 fans connected to Fan Wi-Fi by Powernet; 45% were repeat visitors
• Beyond Wi-Fi analytics revealed attendee movement, dwell time and the food court as the most popular area
• Nearly 20,000 impressions on Powernet social media and a 131% increase in Facebook followers