Red Sox IT chief copes with wireless 'weird stuff' at Fenway Park

Computerworld - NEWTON, Mass. -- With the city of Boston planning a municipal Wi-Fi system that could interfere with fabled Fenway Park's own Wi-Fi hot spot, Boston Red Sox IT Director Steven Conley is bracing himself.

"Wireless systems are continually being upgraded. Frankly, I don't want these municipal wireless systems to happen. I'd rather they all just go away," Conley told an audience at MuniWireless 2007: New England here yesterday.

Conley acknowledged that he was speaking somewhat in jest, however. "I know it has to happen, but I don't want it," he said.

Boston and nearby Newton and Brookline, Mass., are all planning or have begun deploying separate municipal Wi-Fi systems, according to city representatives who attended the conference. Fenway Park is surrounded by buildings and highways just outside the downtown core.

So far, Conley has focused on his park's needs, and he described some incidents of Wi-Fi interference he has already had to deal with, such as television news trucks sending microwave signals of video to nearby roofs of skyscrapers. Sometimes the signals have bounced back, wiping out Wi-Fi coverage for the press box and the Wi-Fi handheld television remote controls used by the team's owners in their suites at the park.

"We do support the press, and they do drive me crazy," Conley said. The Red Sox first installed Wi-Fi in the main press box in 2003. If something didn't work, he said, "my answer was just to get a bigger antenna."

In subsequent years, the Red Sox have added a separate Wi-Fi network for internal staff, as well as another network to support wireless ticket-scanning and concessions for in-seat orders of drinks and snacks in some areas.

There have been many challenges, especially when working with a ballpark building that's 95 years old. When Conley tried to convince photographers working in photo pits next to each dugout area that Wi-Fi would be preferable to a wired connection to transmit their photos from laptops, he had the rain factor in mind. "Cables were fine except when it rains and the photo pits become bathtubs," he said. "The photogs were against Wi-Fi from the get-go, by the fourth game using it, it was no longer an issue."

The arrival this spring of Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka brought an onslaught of media coverage, resulting in 25 news trucks parked near the field and shooting microwave signals to four nearby high-rise towers. The microwave runs in the same spectrum as the Wi-Fi, so reflections off metal and nearby buildings caused interference.

"The only way we figured it out was with a spectrum analyzer," Conley said. So far, the microwave transmissions have top priority, he said, but at least he understands what's going on.