Wireless Stadiums: The Next Best Thing to Not Being There

On Sunday, Sept. 16, the New England Patriots played their home opener at Gillette Stadium against the Arizona Cardinals, a team they were expected to rout. They did not. For the first three quarters, the home team’s offense bogged down, its running backs gobbled up by the Cardinal defense, its offensive line porous, its receivers unable to get open or to catch the ball when they did.

It’s just as well, then, that the Patriots organization chose that weekend to give their fans access to the world’s greatest font of distraction: the Internet. The team this summer hired Enterasys Networks, an Andover (Mass.) network and security solutions company, to wire Gillette with hundreds of access points and antennae and 15 miles of cable, turning the building into a giant Wi-Fi hotspot in a multimillion-dollar deal (neither Enterasys nor the team will get more specific about the cost).