Super Bowl Rogue Hunting


Second From Left 😉

This was an incredible opportunity. I got to run around the concourse hunting rogue APs with an AirCheck. I was able to find one in a media pressbox while they were covering pre-event they day of the Super Bowl. Luckily they were not on air when I found it. They were running a Linksys AP on a 40MHz channel! It was easy to track down with the AirCheck and external antenna.

Something that blew my mind was the noise floor of this stadium. It was a Cisco designed stadium and the floor sat around -80 when no fans were present in the stands, and as high as -71 during the event! Thinking of typical wireless design I'm used to seeing floors in the -90s so seeing a noise floor of -71 is 100 times worse! (Rules of 10s and 3s). I would regularly see an SNR of 5-10dB and MCS rates of less than 50Mbps. I didn't realize the incredible challenges of designing a wireless network for the largest sporting event in the US. Under seat APs in the stands and overhead in the concourse.

Most vendors were happy to turn off their APs and use the free provided Super Bowl WiFi, but there was some pushback. The biggest thing was telling them they might be having a slightly better experience, they would be affecting everyone else around them, potentially thousands impacted from one AP!

Meeting some of the other talent at Extreme and the NFL was amazing. There are truly some incredibly talented wireless engineers in this space and I'm very lucky to get to learn from them.

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