Of the various technological innovations on display at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium, the average season ticket holder might be most impressed by the bottom-filling beer. A drinker would normally wait as long as 40 seconds for his pint glass to be held under a tap and conventionally filled. At the 54-meter bar, the longest in Europe, the liquid is fed through a valve in the receptacle's base, gushing up in just 11 seconds like the beer in Thor's magically replenishing mug. With nearly 63,000 people showing up to matches, speed is of the essence.
But the beer is not the only thing that flows quickly at the "Spurs" temple to soccer in north London. American sports stadiums are often keen to advertise their investment in 5G for the dual needs of smartphone-using fans and site operations. To serve up its own high-speed connectivity, Tottenham preferred Wi-Fi courtesy of HPE, its technology partner ever since the stadium opened seven years ago.
Related:HPE CEO squares up to Cisco and Huawei as Juniper deal pays off "For us, the vast majority of our use cases are served by Wi-Fi and we've made such an investment in Wi-Fi from a fan connectivity perspective that it made sense just to continue to use Wi-Fi for that," said Rob Pickering, the chief technology officer of Tottenham Hotspur Football Club, during a press conference at the stadium before his team played Newcastle United last weekend. "Operationally, it underpins all the things we do as well," he added. "We kind of need to make that investment anyway."
HPE has been able to sport a private 5G offer ever since its acquisition of Athonet, a small Italian software company, in 2023. Unlike the public 5G services provided by the big UK telcos, it would have allowed Tottenham to have its own dedicated, small-scale network for site operations. But while private 5G was considered, Tottenham eventually opted for a Wi-Fi-only approach, said Pickering.
In seventh heaven
That does not mean 5G is invisible at the stadium. "We have significant 5G penetration here across the mobile carriers in a non-private sense," said the Tottenham CTO. When the grounds were full later that day, the 5G service on EE's network did perform well, unlike various Tottenham players. But many fans deliberately seek out the Wi-Fi.
"Up to about 30,000 people operate the Wi-Fi at any given time, so we sometimes get to about 50% penetration," said Pickering. "Other times, it's 15,000 or 20,000. It rarely drops below 15,000 in terms of usage of Wi-Fi at any given time from a fan perspective." Connecting to local Wi-Fi networks can often mean navigating a laborious registration process. Tottenham's is inarguably straightforward.
Related:HPE goes big on Juniper tech for Winter Olympics Italian job An upgrade of the infrastructure is also making the network even faster and more capable of meeting Tottenham's needs. That involves replacing as many as 1,800 access points dotted around the stadium, of which 800 are lodged unobtrusively beneath seats. Within the next month, what Pickering describes as a multi-million-dollar activity will support the stadium-wide use of Wi-Fi 7, the latest addition to the Wi-Fi lineup. It will, he reckons, make Tottenham one of the first stadiums in the world to unleash the new technology.
The impetus has come mainly from the connectivity demands of stadium visitors. Wi-Fi 7 should deliver "many orders of times more bandwidth than Wi-Fi 6," said Pickering. "Bandwidth is the heart of what we do and when you have the demands that we see from our hirers, from football, from our fans going up exponentially, our ability to respond to that requires the latest in technology."
Those Wi-Fi 7 products come from HPE's longer-standing Aruba unit rather than the Mist division it gained with last year's $14 billion takeover of Juniper Networks. Even so, the gradual convergence of those portfolios should give Tottenham access to some Juniper-originated software innovation in the future, according to Pickering. More immediately, the Aruba Central platform that manages the whole affair keeps the Wi-Fi network for spectators separate from the Wi-Fi network used by operations.
Related:AT&T and Ericsson demo 5G sensing for drone detection
Disengaging VMware
The HPE refresh, with the other technology components it includes, is also allowing Tottenham to use AI for IT operations at the stadium, or what is often shortened to AIOps. And as part of the multi-million-dollar overhaul, the club is dispensing with Broadcom-owned VMware like an expensive but out-of-form striker and introducing substitutes from HPE named Morpheus, OpsRamp and VME (VM Essentials).
The core of VMware's offering was a hypervisor, the software layer that runs virtual machines. HPE's technology replaces it and foregoes other features that held little relevance for Tottenham. "VME is a completely capable replacement of VMware," said Pickering. "There are many reasons why we think VME was a great decision for us, and not all of them were cost-based."
Nevertheless, Matt Harris, HPE's managing director for UKIMEA (the UK, India, the Middle East and Africa), insists Tottenham will have seen the "huge cost saving of removing VMware licenses" and adopting a more fit-for-purpose system. Tools like Morpheus should enable it to manage network resources, carry out upgrades and do predictive maintenance more speedily and efficiently than it could in the past.
All that might include the use of AI "to manage things like radio power in access points" or "upgrades of switches across the stadium," Pickering explained. "If we do have issues, it cuts down the time of resolution," Harris said. "Our ability to have the technology that solves those problems quickly, if they do come about, is critically important to my team."
The physical foundation of all this can be seen at the stadium in what amounts to a small data center equipped with racks of HPE's ProLiant-branded servers and other necessary gubbins. Greenlake, HPE's cloud-computing service, is typically pitched by the company as a "hybrid cloud" that can be hosted on-premises or offsite. But just about all the relevant processing happens at the stadium and not in the large data centers commonly referred to as the cloud, said Pickering. "We've a cloud bill in the hundreds of pounds a month, not in the hundreds of thousands of pounds."
Cost concerns
Tottenham appears to have signed the contract for the upgrade last November, and since then there has been a sharp increase in component prices. "You are seeing a huge surge in demand in the market and a lot of that comes from big AI buildout, hyperscalers, large language model creators, sovereign governments," said Harris. "Fundamentally, there is not enough supply that can deliver all the demand that has existed in 2026."
Whether that has had implications for Tottenham is less clear. HPE charges for Greenlake on a usage basis, and Harris said the deal for equipment installed on site would have been done before any of the big price increases. With Morpheus and VME, Tottenham should also need less equipment than it did in the VMware days, he believes. "There's actually a big TCO [total cost of ownership] story that Spurs have achieved," said Harris.
Cost inflation, unsurprisingly, was a major concern for equity analysts when HPE last discussed its quarterly financial performance. It brought an acknowledgement from CEO Antonio Neri that customers in the market "are challenged because of the price increases we have seen driven by the cost of commodity." Yet HPE hopes to mitigate the impact through sales growth and savings. Cuts have already been made. HPE and Juniper had a combined headcount of 72,271 employees before their merger went through last summer. By October, it had shrunk to 67,000.
This week's update seems like further bad news for VMware, which has suffered other customer losses since Broadcom acquired it three years ago. For all the attention 5G gets in a US stadium setting, it is also proof of Wi-Fi's enduring appeal to others. HPE must have been relieved to see Tottenham narrowly avoid relegation from the top-flight English Premier League earlier this year, a drop that would have carried a hefty cost. But the team awkwardly lost its home fixture against Newcastle on the day of the technology tour. At least the consolation beer took only seconds to pour.