Shortly after the Federal Communications Commission opened the 6 GHz band to unlicensed use in 2020, new broadband opportunities blossomed across the telecom industry – and launched speculation over the control of enterprise private networks between budding technologies like Wi-Fi 6 and 5G.

Cisco predicted the new Wi-Fi model would act as a supplement to 5G, and the Chase Center arena – home turf for the Golden State Warriors – seems to offer proof to their prediction.

The center built its Wi-Fi 6E running entirely on an Aruba tech stack, and debuted the network on Sept., 3, 2022, in time for an Alicia Keys concert. The network is meant to serve in tandem with a “robust and scalable 5G network” for fan experience, according to Daniel Brusilovsky, VP of Technology for the Golden State Warriors.

Brusilovsky sat down with SDxCentral to discuss the buildout and deployment as a budding use case for the latest Wi-Fi iteration.

SDxCentral: Why Wi-Fi 6E?

Brusilovsky: One thing that is really unique about how we create the best fan experience possible is that it all starts with connectivity, right?

We were one of the first venues to deploy Wi-Fi 6 when we opened in 2019. But even after that we had a lot of really exciting conversations with the Aruba team and HPE team around what was coming in the future because there's been a lot of shifts, obviously, in the last few years. But I think this jump to 6E, obviously one of the biggest things with it opening up was the six gigahertz spectrum.

The biggest thing that really resonated with us with the ability to provide more bandwidth for our fans, especially in a very densely populated area, like the seating bowl of an arena. When you have 80,000 people in a tight space, you need to ensure that you have the most connectivity possible with the least amount of interference and service degradation.

We were kind of joking with everyone in the HPE team that it almost seems like 6E was kind of built for us.

SDxCentral: What was the deployment process like?

Brusilovsky: The process of actually deploying the new 635 APs was actually pretty seamless.

In our seating bowl, we have about 250 or so APs that are in enclosures under seats. So what we essentially had to do is, over the course of about a week and a half, swap all of the APs that were in those existing enclosures.

So we took out the old AP, put the new 635 in there, and the great news is that we didn't have to update any of our switches. We didn't have to update any of our core network. Everything pretty much stayed the same except for just the new APs.

So that process is honestly one of the selling points of why we wanted to do this is that we didn't have to overhaul our entire network.

SDxCentral: What have the challenges been?

Brusilovsky: The easy part has been done, which is the swapping of APs. Now it's the tuning. So the RF frequency coordination, the tuning of signals, all those different things is what the focus is now – making sure that we are optimizing the experience as much as possible.

The biggest thing is just the unknown, being that we are so early in this process, you're going into uncharted territories a little bit. And so everything that we find could be potentially the very first time we have found this issue, so a lot of it is just working through that.

We're a very fast moving business that's very different than just an office environment. And the APs being in the arena bowl, meaning they're all essentially guest facing, those are our customers engaging with that technology, so we have a sense of urgency that is probably unlike many other businesses. So there's kind of this battle all the time of: okay, if we can't figure this out, we gotta figure it out pretty quickly because we have customers coming into our environment.

This interview was edited for length and clarity.

Photo: The Chase Center Arena bowl, where the Wi-Fi network is deployed. Source: Golden State Warriors