Rogers Centre WiFi

To kick off the 39th season of the Toronto Blue Jays, the Rogers Centre in downtown Toronto unveiled its latest feature: Free Wi-Fi to all visitors to the stadium. Over the period of some months, the Network and IT divisions of Rogers, along with contractors from Cisco, deployed the Cisco Connected Stadium Wi-Fi product in the Rogers Centre under the SSID ROGERS WiFi Public.

Compared to the efforts of our peers in Network, our job in IT was relatively straightforward: Implement a secure authentication portal that could scale instantly to the levels required in the Rogers Centre (seating capacity: 54,000) with integration with Cisco. I worked closely with a typically small and nimble team of lead developer Jonathan Bouganim (Sr. Developer) and David Sedgwick (Manager, Quality Assurance) to drive the solution live well in advance of our project deadline.

I attended the home opener of the Blue Jays on April 13, 2015 as part of the team monitoring the deployment in its first mass-scale usage by the public. The project was a complete success, with over 20,000 visitors connecting and making use of the wi-fi simultaneously. Many attendees of the game expressed their pleasure via social media:

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