Industry News

Auckland’s Spark Arena debuts new Wi-Fi system

Spark Arena in the New Zealand city of Auckland has launched a new in-venue Wi-Fi system in partnership with Huawei as part of an effort to boost visitor experience.

The solution went live in time for concerts by American punk rock band Green Day, which played at the venue on May 13 and 14.

According to Scoop, the network uploaded and downloaded more than 400GB of data over the two days, as fans used the system to check in online and share photos of the concert on social media.

Spark Arena’s Wi-Fi network is free-to-use for anyone visiting the venue and is available across the arena site.

Brendan Hines, general manager at Spark Arena, said: “Here at the Arena, we’re all about creating amazing live experiences and lasting memories for fans. We could see over the weekend that fans embraced the new technology for things like event information and of course capturing and sharing the buzz of the live gig through social media.”

Neal Richardson, portfolio director for WiFi at Huawei, added: “It’s without a doubt the best WiFi technology currently available at a large venue in New Zealand. The Spark Arena network supports over ten times the capacity of the WiFi at other large scale New Zealand sporting and entertainment venues.

“Up to 80 per cent of a full capacity audience should be able to connect to WiFi simultaneously. The solution has been designed so that thousands of users can concurrently use their devices to send messages to friends or check social feeds.”

Richardson added: “The arena has 300 antennas available right around the venue, way more than for equivalent venues of a similar size, to ensure visitors can jump online wherever in the building they are located.”