We’ve all heard the cliché, “defense wins championships.” In the modern era of the NFL, I’d argue there’s a new MVP that never takes a snap, never makes a tackle, and is completely invisible to the 70,000 fans in the stands. I’m talking about the network.
As Levi’s Stadium gears up for Super Bowl LX, the conversation is naturally dominated by point spreads, commercials and halftime shows. But for those of us who live and breathe infrastructure, the real story is happening 40 miles south of San Francisco in Santa Clara. I recently had the chance to walk through the stadium with Costa Kladianos, executive vice president and head of tech for the San Francisco 49ers, and a team of engineers from the NFL and Cisco. My takeaway? What Cisco has built here isn’t just a stadium network—it’s a blueprint for the future of the hyper-connected enterprise.
The “Taylor Swift” threshold
To understand the scale of the challenge at Levi’s Stadium, we have to look at the data. Kladianos told us that their previous record for data upload was set during the Taylor Swift Eras Tour. It makes sense; that demographic is the most tech-savvy audience on the planet, livestreaming every costume change in 4K.
But the Super Bowl is a different animal. We aren’t just talking about fans posting selfies. We’re talking about tens or even hundreds of thousands of connected devices—fans, media, coaches, and point-of-sale (POS) systems—all competing for the same airwaves. During my tour, I spoke to Matt Swartz, distinguished engineer at Cisco, about the growth of traffic. Back in 2012, a Super Bowl might see 300 GB of total data. Today, that number has grown to more than 40 TB. In a world where any kind of lag means frustrated fans and lost revenue, the old “good enough” Wi-Fi of the past isn’t going to cut it.
Wi-Fi 7: Moving beyond table stakes
For years, I’ve said that great Wi-Fi is table stakes for any venue, but now it’s mission critical. That has been hard to deliver with Wi-Fi 6 and older specs. But at Levi’s Stadium, Cisco is moving the goalposts by implementing the world’s first large-scale Wi-Fi 7 deployment in a stadium.
Why does Wi-Fi 7 matter here? It’s not just about raw speed—though it has plenty of that. It’s about the 6 GHz spectrum and what Cisco calls “hyper-directional” antennas. Swartz explained that this is the fourth generation of their high-density offering. The challenge in a stadium has always been serving fans at a distance while maintaining security and signal integrity. Wi-Fi 7 provides the flexibility and uplink capacity to ensure that when 70,000 people simultaneously try to upload a video of a game-winning touchdown, the network doesn’t fall over. It’s important to understand the criticality of uplink bandwidth as the Super Bowl, like concerts, drives a high volume of social media traffic—people want their friends to know they are there. I’ve seen many stadiums with great download speeds, but upload capacity is limited. This was a key consideration for the design of the Wi-Fi 7 network.
And there’s a deeper business lesson here for IT leaders. The stadium didn’t just add more access points. The team performed a total technology overhaul. They combined their sound systems, LED screens (including the world’s largest outdoor 4K video boards), and production systems into a single, brand-new Cisco data center. This is the “One Cisco” approach I’ve written about before—breaking down silos to create a unified, observable environment. While there are many vendors that offer products to stadiums, Cisco’s platform approach addresses all aspects of stadium operations.
Security and networking in tandem
One of the most impressive aspects of the Levi’s Stadium tour was seeing how the Secure Networking vision has come together. George Griesler, senior director of cybersecurity for the NFL, provided some specifics of the deployment while giving a tour of the security operations center.
The Super Bowl is considered a Tier 1 event, meaning it’s a high-value target for threat actors. To get ready for this, the NFL and Cisco have deployed a massive overlay network that acts as a frontline defense for the Super Bowl. A Joint Operation Center (JOC) is active 24/7, combining NFL security teams, stadium IT, and Cisco experts to monitor for incidents. Security teams are seeing a ramp-up in attacks, primarily consisting of short-lived malicious domains, credential compromises, and phishing attempts using the NFL logo.
The team uses a blocking attack philosophy—proactively stopping threats via firewalls, Cisco Umbrella (DNS), and XDR (extended detection and response) before they can disrupt game operations or human safety. Griesler shared these statistics as a snapshot of activity over a 7-day period leading up to the game:
- 27,000+ active clients on the network
- 400,000+ firewall connection attempts blocked
- 47,000+ malicious DNS queries blocked via Cisco Umbrella
The stadium network runs ticketing, medical services, and millions of dollars in concessions over the same wires, so stopping breaches is imperative.
Griesler talked about the impact if a breach were to happen: “If a threat actor takes over a scoreboard or a digital sign or takes control of a PA system, we would have pandemonium and panic in the stadium. I’m not saying breaches won’t occur, but now we have the playbook to react.”
By using the network as a sensor, Cisco can identify and mitigate threats before they ever reach the end zone.
The invisible experience
The irony of great infrastructure is that when it works perfectly, nobody notices. Fans at Super Bowl LX will enjoy a high-quality experience—instant replays on their phones, seamless mobile ordering, and lightning-fast social sharing—without ever thinking about the terabits of data moving beneath their feet.
However, for the rest of us, there are lessons to take away from the deployment. Whether you’re running a global retail chain, a hospital, or a football stadium, the experience is only as good as the network it runs on. Cisco’s work at Levi’s Stadium shows that for organizations where the network is the business, which is most companies today, the network of the future is here. It’s ready for the Super Bowl, and if it can enable a high density, multi-media experience like that, it can support any organization.