A Baseball Fan's Dream Job: MLB CIO

Esther Schindler writes: "Bob Zweig, CIO of the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball team, has a job just like yours. Except, of course, his is a lot cooler. Unless you, too, get to think about storing terabytes of video data of baseball players, honing the cutting edge of mobile social media, and supplying Wi-Fi to 50,000 of your closest friends.

Esther Schindler interviewed Zwieg, in The Baseball Fan's Dream IT Job: CIO of the Arizona Diamondbacks:

The toughest technology to deliver is the free wireless broadband that every fan gets at Chase Field. "Wi-Fi works really well to cover squares. The contours of the facility make it extremely challenging,” he says. Everything in wireless design is built around a square — not the shape of a baseball stadium, with a lot of people moving around. Even more frustrating: The most important place to have wireless coverage is between the dugouts, and that's where there's the most interference and conflicts.

And, of course, everyone needs the bandwidth at the same time, like a highway filling up at rush hour with all its variability and congestion. "We add as much capacity as we can with a lot of access points," Zweig says. There's a Wi-Fi access point on all the overhangs, and every section has its own access point (5 GHz directional and two directional antennas), not counting the offices and clubhouses. Plus fiber poles back to the data center on the mezzanine. In total, there's about 217 access points at Chase Field. “We put in a lot of them and shape them the best way we can," he says.

And there's plenty more."