The wireless network carrying gate operations for Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, February 2005: Ticketmaster ticketing and access control across seven stadium gates.
Each gate had its own switch and paired access points, backhauled to a central core over six point-to-point bridge pairs in master and slave configuration, with RADIUS authentication on the wireless.
Worked from both sides of the table: the build ran out of Coleman Technologies, and the move to the City followed in April 2005 — so it is filed under Coleman, where it was delivered, and named on the City era too.
The channel plan was the whole problem
A stadium on game day is the most hostile radio environment that exists. Seventy thousand handsets, broadcast trucks, press and public safety are all in the same air, and none of them coordinate with each other or with you.
So the spectrum had to be budgeted rather than assigned. Access points sat on non-overlapping 1, 6 and 11. The backhaul links were deliberately lifted off that plan and onto 6, 11 and 802.11a, to keep the transport out of the 2.4 GHz fight rather than competing with the clients it existed to serve. A backhaul link that degrades under the same load as the access layer is not a backhaul link; it is a second failure that arrives at the same moment as the first.
No second attempt
The gates either scan or seventy thousand people do not get in. That is the entire acceptance criterion, and it is evaluated once.
Most networks are judged over a period — availability across a quarter, incidents per month, a mean time to repair. An event network is judged in a window of a few hours that will not be repeated, against a load that cannot be rehearsed at scale, in an RF environment that only exists on the day. Everything about the design follows from that: margin over elegance, diversity over density, and a spectrum plan that assumes the air will be worse than the survey said.
The video surveillance estate and command center for the same event was a separate program, on separate transport.
Outcome
Gate operations that scanned, on the one day of the year when there is no second attempt.