I spent a good amount of my childhood living in the Dallas area when my father taught economics and chaired a commercial banking school at Southern Methodist University. SMU football was exciting in the early 1980s, featuring the famous “Pony Express” running back tandem of Craig James and Eric Dickerson. The same was true in the professional ranks with the Dallas Cowboys and its star quarterback of the 1970s, Roger Staubach. I have many fond memories watching the Mustangs and Cowboys in person at iconic venues including the Cotton Bowl and Texas Stadium that pre-dated the existence of both Wi-Fi and mobile wide area networks — and that admission makes me feel old!
Flash forward more than 45 years, and the business of collegiate and professional sports and their supporting venues is decidedly high-tech. Today, connectivity serves a multitude of use cases from back-office applications to front-office operations to fan activations. At the same time, ensuring security is of the utmost importance given the volume of mobile devices and users that access modern networks and the enormous scale of the attack surface that presents itself to bad actors.
To gain further insights into the challenges involved with providing secure connectivity at scale at the Dallas Cowboys’ AT&T Stadium, I recently spent time with Matt Messick, who leads IT operations for the organization, as well as leaders from the Cowboys’ long-standing connectivity infrastructure deployment partner Extenet. In this piece, I will highlight what I find noteworthy about the partnerships, and ultimately what AT&T and Extenet are doing to support both a secure and highly performant network architecture.
AT&T Dynamic Defense
The Dallas Cowboys are a globally recognized sports franchise, and consequently a target for bad actors. For the past nine straight years, Forbes has ranked the NFL team as the most valuable sports team in the world — most recently eclipsing the $10 billion mark. According to Messick, this presents a unique set of operational challenges to secure not only the Cowboys’ dedicated IT infrastructure, but also the many other business ventures operated by owner Jerry Jones.
As one might imagine, the Dallas Cowboys are a potential target for denial-of-service attacks, ransomware attacks, and other compromises intended to cause operational disruption for illicit financial gain. It turns out that AT&T’s involvement with the team goes much deeper than its stadium naming sponsorship. AT&T recently announced that its Dynamic Defense cybersecurity protection is embedded directly into the Cowboys’ dedicated internet circuit, complementing other layered security solutions. AT&T claims that Dynamic Defense it is the first and only network protection of its type with built-in security controls, which positions it to serve as the first line of defense to protect businesses of all sizes.
What I like about the solution is that there is no need for extra equipment, and that the on-demand nature of Dynamic Defense allows it to be deployed within minutes, rather than weeks or months. From my perspective, the potential for dramatically reducing inbound threats and corresponding alerting with Dynamic Defense is also significant. Alert fatigue is a major challenge for organizations, despite the use of AI and machine learning to consolidate and interpret telemetry data feeds. It’s also worth highlighting that the AT&T network backbone carries more than 720 petabytes of data daily, allowing the company to have a unique level of visibility while analyzing a large amount of telemetry and threat intelligence data.
Extenet Network Design and Deployment
I’ve written about Extenet in the past, particularly about its work with the Circuit of the Americas in Austin. At a high level, Extenet specializes in high-performance public and private network deployments for indoor and outdoor applications across various industries, including sports, entertainment, hospitality, enterprises, and municipalities.
Extenet has enjoyed a relationship with the Dallas Cowboys dating back fifteen years to the construction of AT&T Stadium. At the time of the venue’s opening, the company facilitated the deployment of a distributed antenna system and fiber infrastructure. The networking infrastructure has grown significantly since then, and AT&T Stadium now boasts the largest indoor network in the world. It includes 700 sectors, 2,300 antennas, and masting antenna infrastructure capable of not only supporting every operational aspect of the venue but also accommodating the connectivity needs of up to 90,000 spectators.
Based on my conversations with Extenet, it’s clear that an investment in fortifying public mobile services with venue infrastructure that supports 5G C-Band licensed spectrum has been an important consideration for ensuring dependable and highly performant connectivity. Millimeter-wave spectrum promised the same, but with a big price tag — and still needing small and macro cell densification to extend propagation. Extenet’s investment provides some incredibly fast multi-gigabit upload and download speeds, and the company is also discussing the possibility of a future private cellular network at AT&T Stadium. I would speculate that some of the use cases could include crowd management using computer vision, improved staff communication, and mobile payment processing, among many other possibilities.
Secure Connectivity Serves as a North Star
The Dallas Cowboys depend on both AT&T and Extenet to ensure the deployment of secure connectivity at AT&T Stadium. It is not a trivial task, given the expansive nature of the venue, the sheer number of users accessing network services, and the highly visible nature of the Cowboys, all of which give bad actors an incentive to try to compromise the venue’s IT infrastructure.
I believe the work that AT&T and Extenet are doing for the Cowboys organization can serve as a model for other sports franchises and sporting venues that struggle with similar challenges. Ultimately, the investment in highly secure and performant connectivity infrastructure leads to not only an enhanced fan experience, but also additional monetization and operational efficiencies for venue operations.
