Giants claim another title — this time for Wi-Fi connectivity

The San Fransisco Giants have won three championships in the last five years. The team now claims a different sort of title -- the most connected stadium in baseball. Over the years, the Giants and networking partner AT&T have been bulking up the stadium's ability to handle fans' phone calls, Web surfing and app usage. The stadium now has more Wi-Fi access points than any sports venue other than AT&T Stadium in Texas and it tops even that facility when it comes to number of hotspots per seat. And the team and AT&T aren't sitting still. Over the next year, they plan to increase the number of Wi-Fi hotspots by nearly a third. In terms of connectivity, the stadium has come a long way since it opened 15 years ago, when there weren't any Wi-Fi access points there, because few people were yet using the technology.

The Giants first installed hotspots in 2004. On opening day that season, AT&T Park had 120 access points that divvied up the 6 megabits per second worth of broadband that was coming into the stadium. A grand total of 94 fans connected to the hotspots using their laptops and Palm and Hewlett-Packard iPaq handheld computers. Today, the stadium has 1,302 hotspots -- or more than 20 per section -- that are sharing a 1-gigabit connection. Nearly 13,000 fans, or more than 30 percent of those attending, are connecting to the network each game. And that's not counting the private networks running on those same hotspots that are used by the baseball teams, ticket takers with their wireless electronic scanners, and the reporters and photographers covering the games. By the 2016 season, the team expects to have around 1,700 Wi-Fi access points in place.