For the last 64 years, Sundays in Denver have been dominated by Broncos football. When the Broncos play a home game at Empower Field at Mile High, over 80,000 fans pack the stands, which is about the population of the south Denver suburb of Castle Rock. Empower Field transforms into a miniature city for eight or nine game days each year, which presents its own set of challenges.
“[Hackers and data thieves] kind of keeps me up at night,” said Russ Trainor, the Broncos’ senior vice president of information technology. “From a threat perspective, ransomware attacks are the buzzword these days.”
Many of the Broncos’ technological challenges fall into the lap of Trainor, whose gameday looks a lot different than your typical fan. Trainor arrives at the stadium at around 8 a.m. to check on his staff and ensure operations are running smoothly and that the stadium’s WiFi network is intact.
While set up in the pressbox for the majority of the day, Trainor’s role is to make sure that gameday goes off without a hitch for the fans and staff at Empower Field. One of the biggest factors of a successful gameday is ensuring that the stadium’s WiFi infrastructure is firing on all cylinders, so fans can upload photos of the game and operations workers don’t hit any speed bumps.
“When we have around 80,000 people in [the stadium], we’ll get 40,000 to 42,000 people on WiFi,” said Trainor. “So it has to be a good experience.”
Updating the stadium’s WiFi has been one of Trainor’s biggest priorities since arriving in Denver in 2008 and has come with a plethora of roadblocks. One of the biggest challenges is the stadium itself, which was finished in 2001.
“This stadium is older,” Trainor said. “It was launched in 2001 but was really built in 2000, so it wasn’t built for all the tech we’re trying to put in here.”
Finding enough space to put in new technology has been a constant struggle for Trainor and his small, 10-person IT staff. Trainor’s team has installed around 47 miles of cabling and over 2,400 WiFi routers inside Empower Field, all of which are stashed in unsuspecting places like under seats and inside guardrails.
Those routers are hidden and protected by thick plastic shields, which fans love to use as drums to create noise on gameday, much to Trainor’s dissatisfaction.
“I hate when I see [fans] drumming on these things, but they still do it,” Trainor said. “[The routers] are fine though; they’re not bouncing around in there.”
On game days, fans inside the stadium use about 10 to 12 terabytes of WiFi per game. For context, the average American family uses 652 gigabytes of WiFi per year, a mere 18% of what the stadium uses in a four- to five-hour span on a Sunday.
When Taylor Swift came to Denver in July 2023, Swifties set a stadium record of around 52 terabytes of WiFi data in two nights, more than doubling the usual game day output. Trainor’s WiFi infrastructure held up to the Swifties’ internet demands, but not by much.
“[Swift] was traveling around, testing everyone’s WiFi networks to their breaking point,” Trainor said. “My WiFi was redlined a bit those nights, for sure.”
Another challenge that comes with having that immense WiFi output is protecting everyone’s data from data thieves and scammers, which is something that Trainor and the Broncos take very seriously.
“[Data leaks] and ransomware scare the crap out of me,” Trainor said. “And really, if it doesn’t scare you, you need to read some articles about that.”
Multiple major sporting teams have suffered cybersecurity attacks in recent years, including the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers and European soccer’s Liverpool FC. To ensure that those kinds of attacks don’t occur at Empower Field, the Broncos have partnered with San Francisco-based Check Point Software.
Check Point’s role on game day is to ensure that all of the fan’s WiFi data is safe, blocking all phishing and ransomware scams at the source.
“Our job is to make sure that all the defenses are up to date and all working very well way ahead of time so the fan experience can be the best it can be,” said Check Point’s Head of Engineering Robbie Elliott. “At the end of the day, it’s all about the fan experience.”
So far, Trainor and Check Point’s collaboration has been a successful one. The Broncos and Empower Field at Mile High haven’t suffered from any cybersecurity attacks and intend to keep it that way.
Although the technological world is ever-changing, Trainor and the Broncos are set up well for their future at Empower Field, however long that may be. As rumors of a new stadium near Denver International Airport began to swirl and pick up steam, Trainor and his team are dedicated to continuing to bolster the Broncos’ downtown home at Empower Field.
“For the next five to six years, we’ll have a good, solid system.” Trainor said.
