What the Bills needed
Building a new Highmark Stadium gave the Buffalo Bills a rare chance to build a new digital foundation, too. With a lean IT team and zero room for downtime on game day, the Bills needed one secure platform to run every system, not a patchwork of vendors to manage.
About Highmark Stadium
Highmark Stadium is home to the Buffalo Bills and 60,000-plus of the loudest fans in the NFL. Opened in 2026, it hosts everything from game days to concerts and community events year-round.
Challenge
The Bills' original 1970-built stadium ran on a mixed-vendor environment supported by an IT staff sized for the technology of its time. As fan expectations rose, the aging infrastructure couldn't keep pace. It was suffering from:
- Inconsistent connectivity: Slow, unreliable Wi-Fi left fans without the seamless in-venue experience they expect from a modern stadium.
- Fragmented, multi-vendor security stack: Separate systems for firewalls, switching, and Wi-Fi meant resolving a security issue required checking multiple vendors and systems individually, with no single, validated security posture across the stadium.
- Underutilized data: Without one unified network, the Bills had no real-time way to understand fan movement, demand, or venue operations.
Solution
The Bills moved to a single Cisco platform across the entire stadium: one vendor for wired and wireless networking, security, and broadcast, giving their lean IT team one place to see and manage every system.
One fabric for fans and broadcast:
One place to secure it:
One center of operational insights:
- Cisco Spaces
- WiPro VisionEDGE (co-designed by Cisco)
- Webex Calling
- Cisco UCS/Nutanix
Single pane of glass
A lean IT team can spot and resolve issues anywhere in the stadium from a single dashboard, instead of chasing problems across separate vendor tools.
Built for peak demand
The network is engineered for 80,000 simultaneous connections (even though the stadium holds 60,000) so it holds up through kickoff flyovers, halftime, and big play buzz.
A measurably better fan experience
Early Voice of the Fan survey scores are already climbing on sound, scoreboards, concessions, and connectivity — gains the Bills can trace straight back to the network.
Security built into the network
The same platform that runs the network runs the security. Cisco Secure Firewall isn't a separate system for the Bills' three-person team to learn, monitor, and reconcile — it's part of the environment they already manage.
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