Behind Every Great Fan Experience | How Lightpath Powers Prudential Center Connectivity

When nearly 20,000 fans arrive at the Prudential Center, they expect everything to just work—from digital ticketing and concessions to retail and in-arena connectivity. Behind that seamless experience is a purpose-built fiber network designed for reliability, scalability, and zero compromise.

Hear from the Prudential Center team and Lightpath experts about how custom network design, diverse routing, and true partnership help keep one of the nation’s premier entertainment venues connected—every event, every fan, every time.

Transcript

Narrator: In an arena like the Prudential Center in Newark, New Jersey, the fan experience doesn’t start at the seat. It starts the moment you walk through the doors. And in an increasingly connected and digital world, that experience is intrinsically linked to the network.

Sasha Puric, Chief Technology Officer, Prudential Center: It starts from the moment you walk up to the building. Connectivity for the tickets, being able to get into the facility, all the way through the concession stands, retail experiences — anywhere the fan walks through, they’re connected and they’re touching the infrastructure.

Nobody sees it when it’s working, but when it doesn’t, they hear it. 

Lanazah Murray, Guest Experience Senior Manager, Prudential Center: The fan experience, when the connectivity is slow, is definitely an eyesore. Say you have a sold-out crowd of 16,000-plus. When everyone shows up at the same time, everyone’s using their cellular data. If you haven’t downloaded your tickets already, you’re trying to pull up the Ticketmaster email they sent — and now it’s just that loading screen the whole time.

Sasha Puric, Prudential Center: Having to deal with multiple service providers, not having a reliable infrastructure in place, plus having limited bandwidth — those were the three factors creating the most anxiety and risk.

Narrator: With massive swings in demand and zero tolerance for failure, the team at the arena needed a bulletproof solution.

Todd Margiotta, Senior Director Enterprise Sales, Lightpath: The network can’t quit. The network can’t fluctuate. It needs to work, and it needs to outperform any application the Prudential Center team can throw at it. That’s really where we started.

Tom Gambino, Vice President Sales Engineering, Lightpath: The solution we provided for the arena has two paths that the fiber rides. One penetrates the east side of the building, one the south side. They both connect to diverse equipment within the building. On the other side, the fiber path connects to the Lightpath network with two diverse points of presence. In the event of a failure, if one of those paths were to fail, the equipment would automatically fail over to the other available path.

Sasha Puric, Prudential Center: When we entered the process of engineering the solution, one of the things I really wanted to see was the physical paths Lightpath was proposing to put in front of us. You don’t realize how important it is until you’re working with a venue where you don’t have the visibility — where you’re guessing whether the physical paths actually cross and share the same route. That visual representation was very, very, very helpful. You don’t get that from every vendor. I have to tell you that.

Todd Margiotta, Lightpath: The other unique challenge, and the unique solution design, was being able to provision massive amounts of capacity that could scale incredibly rapidly upward to meet emerging demand, and then scale back down to manage day-to-day consumption requirements.

Narrator: A purpose-built network engineered around the business need — not the infrastructure available — provided the level of customization necessary to pull off the ask.

Tom Gambino, Lightpath: We really start with sitting with the customer and understanding what their needs are, what they’re trying to achieve, the direction of the business, the challenges they have today. A solution that meets their day-to-day needs as well as their growth into the future.

Todd Margiotta, Lightpath: We have a whole slew of people that sit as the unsung heroes of Lightpath. The solutions engineers who were involved from day one, who not only helped us build the solution but then tested it in a lab environment to ensure it worked before we put it into play. Customer support managers who are there day in and day out to support the Prudential Center on day-to-day needs, whatever that may look like. Service delivery project managers — the boots on the ground who actually installed the service and the solution we put together. And our senior leadership team is heavily engaged too. That’s not just for show. When we take on a project like this, we throw the full weight of our organization behind it to ensure success not only on day one, but throughout the continual evolution of a customer’s network.

Sasha Puric, Prudential Center: Let’s not kid ourselves. Every process, every project comes with challenges and speed bumps along the way. We had a couple of those. The important thing was that the Lightpath people were a phone call away. They stepped in, supported us through the process, and found a creative solution to get around the challenges we faced.

Lanazah Murray, Prudential Center: The connectivity now, through the fan’s lens is just seamless. 

Sasha Puric, Prudential Center: We’re proud of the fact that when 20,000 people, 19,000 people come into the building, they don’t have to think about their connected experience. What we do in the background to make that happen is playing a silent hero, because there’s a lot that can go wrong, and we do a lot of things to make sure it doesn’t. This relationship is one of the ones we picked as the partnership to make sure connectivity stays reliable and available. For the most part, we don’t talk a lot about this facility, because it’s reliable, it works — and that’s a testament to the level of respect and trust we’ve built in this relationship.

Narrator: When everything depends on the network, you need a partner who treats it like their own.