Inside Buffalo’s Highmark Stadium: How the Bills and Cisco built one network to run an entire venue, and what IT leaders can learn from it
When the Buffalo Bills opened their new home, Highmark Stadium , for their first regular-season game against the Detroit Lions , most fans noticed the new seats, sightlines, and sound.
When the Buffalo Bills opened their new home, Highmark Stadium , for their first regular-season game against the Detroit Lions , most fans noticed the new seats, sightlines, and sound.
The short version
- What they won’t see is the biggest change: an entire venue running on a single converged network rather than a patchwork of vendor-specific systems.
- That shift, built with Cisco as the stadium’s primary technology partner, offers an excellent case study for IT leaders well beyond professional sports.
- The Bills essentially rebuilt their digital foundation from scratch rather than layering new capabilities onto old infrastructure — and the operational and fan-experience gains have been immediate.
What happened
That wasn’t necessarily hurting the fan experience directly, he said, but it was a constant drain on a lean IT staff. “I really wanted to have robust infrastructure capable of supporting us into the future,” Handley said, describing the goal for the new build.
Why it matters
Handley said several ecosystem vendors wanted to bring in their own gear rather than integrate with the Cisco environment.
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