Being at the forefront of Saudi Arabia’s footballing ambitions, Al-Nassr Club Company, one of the leading football clubs in the Kingdom, is working with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to transform its stadium, training, medical, media, and fan facilities – and thereby the way fans engage with football. Key to this experience is a comprehensive end-to-end solution, built on HPE Aruba Networking, that establishes a coherent, performance-focused and secure network infrastructure.
Throughout the past few years, Al-Nassr has become the most-followed team by football fans outside Saudi Arabia. Aware that not everyone who watches an Al-Nassr match will be able to travel to Saudi Arabia to attend games, and that more than 60 million fans follow their games, Al-Nassr wants to redefine the fan experience with more content, more behind-the-scenes footage, and greater access to star players.
To drive digital content, Al-Nassr is creating a digital sports campus, creating a wireless-first environment engaging both fans within and outside the stadium.
“We always have a minimum of 300–400 people connecting to the network on quiet days, however the number jumps to more than 10,000 on match days,” said Faisal Khan, director of IT at Al-Nassr. “Simultaneously, we are filming throughout the week, across all parts of the organization.
The fan engagement and content we provide goes beyond the match-day experience and with HPE Aruba Networking we are now able to scale and allocate different bandwidth, manage access rights for different user groups, and troubleshoot connectivity issues easily, all from the office.”
The solution deployed at the sports campus combines the capabilities of HPE Aruba Networking Central, HPE Aruba Networking CX switches, HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN, and HPE Aruba Networking Wi-Fi 7 wireless access points. This allows the club’s IT team to closely manage the various fan engagement points, keep sensitive biometric data of players secure, and quickly provide connectivity to new parts of the campus.
The club manages connectivity for 20 buildings, including warehousing and retail outlets, with more stores and branch offices expected as the club expands its operations. By using HPE Aruba Networking EdgeConnect SD-WAN, the club can use multiple connections to provide high availability and resilience, even in times of high use.
This increases performance by link-binding and maximizing the use of available bandwidth, making it particularly valuable to the football club for critical applications, such as video live streaming matches. “As Al-Nassr continues to realise and enhance its vision for fan engagement and data commercialization, it needs a robust and performance-focused networking infrastructure”, said Jamil Ahmad, Country Business lead for Saudi Arabia at HPE Aruba Networking.
“By building a smart sports campus upon HPE Aruba Networking, Al-Nassr has unified and streamlined its networking operations, maximizing opportunities for content generation and simplifying the deployment of game-changing IoT.
This includes the club’s media streaming capabilities, that allow fans to not only watch video streams of games and player interviews from different parts of the world but also stream exclusive content on their smartphone within the stadium – creating a one-of-a-kind experience.”
