NFL's IT chief gears up for his 25th Super Bowl

Wireless networks serve NFL staff and media, also extend to gate control, ticket checking and video surveillance

NFL IT guru David Port claims he doesn't have a favorite football team, but on Sunday he'll be working his 25th Super Bowl. As the league's vice president of information technology, Port and his IT staff are responsible for building a temporary network to support NFL staff and thousands of journalists during Super Bowl week.

Listen to our podcast on Securing Super Bowl 43.

The technology in use Sunday as the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers square off in Tampa, Fla., would probably be unrecognizable to the Port of 25 years ago, who had recently begun working for the NFL.

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NFL IT guru David Port claims he doesn't have a favorite football team, but on Sunday he'll be working his 25th Super Bowl. As the league's vice president of information technology, Port and his IT staff are responsible for building a temporary network to support NFL staff and thousands of journalists during Super Bowl week.

Listen to our podcast on Securing Super Bowl 43.

The technology in use Sunday as the Arizona Cardinals and Pittsburgh Steelers square off in Tampa, Fla., would probably be unrecognizable to the Port of 25 years ago, who had recently begun working for the NFL.

"I have seen a lot of changes over the years. The technology becomes more and more important," Port said in a phone interview Friday.

At Port's first Super Bowl "it was a terminal host-based system over slow communication links, and now everything is broadband," Port said. "The information that the media requires to do their job and the services we need to provide require high-speed networks to deliver video, voice and data."

The most challenging and also most valuable transition in recent years has been the move from wired to wireless networks to support Super Bowl operations, Port said.

"We still run a lot of cabling, but in the past we had to run miles and miles of cable," he said. "Using wireless bridge technologies and Wi-Fi-enabled devices, we've been able to streamline this cost effectively and still provide a reliable, enhanced service."

Port starts preparing for each Super Bowl two years in advance, working with the city and venues where IT operations and media professionals will be based. More intensive planning starts about 11 months before the big game. Port explained that the NFL essentially built a small data center with IBM blade servers at the temporary headquarters in a local Marriott near the Super Bowl site.

"We built out an infrastructure with approximately 300 computers, PCs and laptops, and wired and wireless networks that are used for NFL core operations, for game production and business operations. Much of it is also for media," Port said.

Tasks included setting up a media center for about 4,000 journalists at a Tampa convention center, where Port and his team built a wireless network with a dozen access points to support roughly 500 simultaneous connections.

"The biggest challenges were maintaining security and at the same time being able to handle a large volume of consecutive connections in a relatively small area," Port said.

On game day, wireless Internet needs will grow "exponentially" as journalists converge on the stadium. About 20 Motorola access points were installed in the stadium for the press, and about another 10 outside for a media work tent.

A wireless network is also needed for gate control, ticket checking and video surveillance, which is more extensive on Super Bowl day that it would be for other events at Tampa's Raymond James Stadium. New gates are set up several hundred feet from the stadium, magnetometers and X-ray machines are used, and Super Bowl tickets are scanned against a database kept by the NFL and Ticketmaster.