The Ultimate Fan Experience | The Glass Age | Corning

The Ultimate Fan Experience

The Ultimate Fan Experience

From sending a tweet during the big game to ordering your favorite stadium treat at your seat, Corning is bringing the ultimate fan experience to life

Game Day is here!

You arrive at the stadium and call your friends, asking them where you all should meet. As you gather and head in, the ticket holder scans your phone where you’ve downloaded and saved your ticket. Amidst a sea of fellow fans, you open your stadium app to a map to help locate your seats. As the game gets underway, you take a video of the best play you’ve ever seen – you tweet, snap, share, and text that video to let all your friends and family know you were here watching it live. And as you settle in for the rest of the game, you order some delicious garlic fries straight from the stadium app to be delivered right to your seat.

Talk about the ultimate fan experience, right?

As we head further into the 21st century, the fan experience is evolving. Whether sitting in the stands or keeping it comfy on the couch, the ability to witness that momentous play from a variety of angles and react with your friends and fellow fans near and far is all part of the interactive experience. And if you are packed into a stadium with thousands of others, you don’t want to have to suffer from buffer time and limited bandwidth. From online streaming, app updates, and social media “smack talk” between friends, fans are getting a near real-time, 360-degree experience of the game wherever and whenever.

But what you may not realize is that fan experiences like the one above are enabled by Corning advanced glass technologies – the Corning® Optical Network Evolution (ONE™) Solution, to be specific. As stadiums and arenas all over the country are being upgraded to deliver a better, more connected experience, organizations are deploying the ONE solution to help enable the seamless wireless experience fans have come to expect. To date, ONE has been deployed in over 10 stadiums and arenas across the country with many more found in malls, government buildings, convention centers, and schools.

So what about ONE is helping enable that ultimate fan experience? In two simple words, speed and connectivity. This converged, all-optical fiber network can handle the transmission of more than 8.2 terabits of data per game from fans capturing and sharing the experience on their smartphones. And with fiber as the backbone of this platform, the infrastructure can be scaled nearly infinitely to meet bandwidth needs. Because of that, new records are set for the amount of bandwidth consumed at games nearly every year!

After deploying a ONE Wireless platform at Texas A&M University’s Kyle Field Stadium in 2016, fast, practically instantaneous connectivity is now delivered to more than 100,000 Aggie fans on game day. The university even set a collegiate record that year for the amount of data traffic over the wi-fi network alone – second only to the 2014 Super Bowl!

Most recently, ONE was installed in a major new stadium. This solution will help enable the ultimate, 360-degree fan experience for everyone who comes to watch a game.

But the ONE solution is not just enabling the fan experience from seats in the stadium or on your living room couch – the applications for this solution are limitless. Consider the evolution from just having microphones in football players’ helmets to adding a small camera to capture video, giving fans a flavor for live action during a play. Or being able to monitor an athlete’s vitals and performance on the field during a game, allowing medics and trainers to better train and condition athletes to play a more effective game. Optical fiber isn’t just helping enable an all-encompassing fan experience but also a better experience for athletes, coaches, and staff.

Whether popping your own popcorn at home to watch the game from your couch or ordering garlic fries from your seat at the stadium, the game day experience is evolving. And thanks to optical fiber and its support of fans’ bandwidth needs, the game will continue to become even more immersive than it already is.