Green Day fans share experiences live from Auckland’s Spark Arena

While American rock band Green Day rocked out the newly renamed and revamped Spark Arena last Saturday and Sunday night, fans were able to capture their concert experience while using the new free high-powered Spark Arena Wi-Fi.

Before, during and after the shows, thousands of Green Day fans logged on and made use of the new Wi-Fi uploading and downloading over 400GB of data.

The concerts were the first major outing for Spark’s new Wi-Fi solution, which has been brought in as part of the rebranding of Vector Arena to Spark Arena. Spark partnered with Huawei to develop the high density Wi-Fi solution, making use of technology used in 20 of the top arenas and stadiums right around the world, including the Metricon Stadium on the Gold Coast, Borussia Dortmund stadium in Germany and the Amsterdam Arena in the Netherlands.

Commenting on the roll out of the technology, Brendan Hines, General Manager at Spark Arena, stated “it was amazing to see the Arena Wi-Fi in action for the first time over the weekend. Here at the Arena, we’re all about creating amazing live experiences and lasting memories for fans.

“We could see over the weekend that fans embraced the new technology for things like event information and of course capturing and sharing the buzz of the live gig through social media.”

Neal Richardson, Portfolio Director for Wi-Fi, added “just as Spark bring music into our technology through our partnership with Spotify, we saw an opportunity to bring our tech to music by providing free Wi-Fi to Spark Arena. With Spark Arena WiFi, visitors will be able to jump online easily as part of enjoying the awesome time they’re having at Spark Arena.”

Spark Arena Wi-Fi is available and free to use for all visitors to the venue. The network extends right around the building - and the stadium-sized specifications of the solution installed means that a huge number of gig and event attendees can use the Wi-Fi simultaneously.

Providing an overview of the solution, Richardson continued “it’s without a doubt the best Wi-Fi technology currently available at a large venue in New Zealand.

“The Spark Arena network supports over ten times the capacity of the Wi-Fi at other large scale New Zealand sporting and entertainment venues. When we compare this to international benchmarks such as the Wi-Fi provided at the O2 in London, we think the experience stacks up really well.

“We designed the solution to ensure a significant proportion of a packed Arena audience can connect to Wi-Fi and use it to enhance their experience of visiting the arena. Up to 80% of a full capacity audience should be able to connect to Wi-Fi simultaneously. The solution has been designed so that thousands of users can concurrently use their devices to send messages to friends or check social feeds. The arena has 300 antennas available right around the venue (way more than for equivalent venues of a similar size) to ensure visitors can jump online wherever in the building they are located.”

Introducing Wi-Fi to the Spark Arena is the first initiative under Spark’s naming rights deal with Auckland’s largest indoor venue, with the arena looking at a variety of ways of using technology to enhance visitors’ experiences further in future.

Images: Green Day at Spark Arena (top) and new branding at the venue (below).

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