As the Ryder Cup golf tournament gets underway today, a sprawling network spanning roughly 1,500 acres was rolled out in 12 weeks to bring to life the equivalent of a small smart city that will be put to the ultimate test.
Approximately a quarter of a million golf fans are expected to descend on the Bethpage Black golf course in Farmingdale, New York, to watch golf legends from the U.S. and Europe compete to take home the prestigious Ryder Cup. Some 70,000 to 80,000 of those fans are expected to be at any given time simultaneously accessing internet services over a network built by Safari Systems, a systems integrator, using networking equipment supplied by Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE) that, in addition to providing access to WiFi networks, is also being relied on to backhaul cellular network.
At the core of that network is a set of fiber optic cables that connect 170 HPE Aruba Networking CX switches and 650 Wi-Fi 6E access points with another 25 HPE Aruba Networking UXI sensors being used to monitor network performance using HPE Aruba Networking Central, a cloud-based network management platform that is integrated into a set of operational intelligence dashboards.
Additionally, HPE has deployed an instance of a graphical processor unit (GPU) platform developed in collaboration with NVIDIA on-site in a container to process and analyze telemetry data. This marks the first time the HPE Private Cloud AI platform has been deployed outside of a traditional data center environment.
The Ryder Cup is also making use of AI computer vision to better manage crowd flow, and HPE has developed two AI agents in collaboration with Dataiku, a provider of a platform for building analytics applications. Those AI agents are being used to both manage operations and provide summarizations of specific events, such as a tee shot at a specific hole, that has been captured on video. A total of 67 AI-enabled cameras are monitoring to collect video from all across the golf course..
There is also a Ryder Cup effort underway to develop more advanced spectator and relationship analytics applications that will be used to plan the next Ryder Cup tournament that will take place in Ireland in 2027, says Michael Cole, chief technology officer of golf’s European Tour and Ryder Cup.
HPE has replaced Cisco as the primary provider of networking equipment for a tournament in a New York state park that, among other things, forbids digging to install fiber optic cable. As a result, fiber optic cable has been laid across walkways and roads that, in addition to spectators, will be used by thousands of golf carts and trucks. In some instances, that fiber optic cable has been strewn across trees to avoid traffic.
At the same time, HPE and Safari Systems needed to make sure that the frequencies being used for wireless networking did not interfere with any of the frequencies used by law enforcement, with an expected visit from President Trump to the tournament having already raised tight security levels even higher.
Hopefully, over the next three days, network connectivity will enable golf fans attending the tournament to easily share their experiences with the outside world in real time. In the meantime, there will be a lack of media coverage of the event itself, but for many of those fortunate enough to attend in person, the HPE network is going to be the primary means of staying connected to an outside world.
