Time Warner Cable said it has installed 235 WiFi access points spanning the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, home of the U.S. Open tennis championships now underway in Flushing Meadows, N.Y.
The WiFi deployment is TWC’s largest public venue installation to date, the MSO said in this blog post.
And visitors don't have to be a TWC broadband subscriber to partake. As part of its five-year agreement with the US Tennis Association, TWC has agreed to offer complimentary WiFi to all U.S. Open visitors during the two-week grand slam event.
TWC said Open attendees "can access unlimited free WiFi throughout the tournament" by connecting to one of two available SSIDs: “USOpen2014” or “TWC WiFi.”
“We are excited to expand our sponsorship of the US Open,” said Jeffrey A. Hirsch, EVP, chief marketing/sales officer of residential services at Time Warner Cable. “We’re all increasingly reliant on WiFi and our phones, so we’re happy that we can help fans get what they need without missing any of the action.”
TWC's WiFi work for the U.S. Open spotlights the cable's industry's broader efforts around the technology.
TWC is also a member of a “Cable WiFi” roaming consortium that also involves Comcast, Cox Communications, Cablevision Systems and Bright House Networks. Together, they’ve deployed more than 250,000 hotspots that are available to their respective broadband customers.
Speaking at the “Tech It Out” conference last week in Philadlephia put on by the local Women In Cable & Telecommunications chapter, Mike Hayashi, TWC’s EVP of architecture, development and engineering, estimated that 60% of the MSO’s access points are in outdoor locations, with the balance installed indoors.
WiFi “is a tremendous enabler for our business,” Hayashi said, noting that recent data shows that TWC supports about of 17 million wireless sessions on its WiFi network each month, with about one-fifth of that traffic coming way of the MSO’s roaming partners. That has resulted in about 240 terabytes of traffic, meaning single average usage is in the neighborhood of 17 megabytes.
