Baseball fans who have grown accustomed to stadium seatmates yakking on cellphones may soon have to deal with another technological incursion into the grand old game: laptop-toting fans surfing the Web and sending e-mails.
Major League Baseball’s 75th annual All-Star Game tonight at Minute Maid Park in Houston, home of the Astros, will be the first All-Star contest to offer high-speed wireless WiFi Internet access to fans. Using technology provided in part by a Waltham WiFi company, Colubris Networks Inc., the Astros turned on their new WiFi network 11 days ago, to ensure that it will run smoothly for tonight’s crush of more than 43,000 fans and news media workers.
Houston is the second Major League ballpark to launch public WiFi in the stands, following a similar deployment this year at the San Francisco Giants’ SBC Park, named after telecom provider SBC Communications Inc. In San Francisco, the free service includes a “Digital Dugout” offering fans downloadable video highlights and trivia contests when play on the field slows down. The St. Louis Cardinals plan to offer WiFi in their new stadium, set to open in 2006.
WiFi may be on its way to joining beer and popcorn as a standard ballpark amenity. But some analysts question just how popular it will really prove to be, outside of hard-core statistics checkers and office hooky players.
“For sports venues, there can be some really interesting applications for WiFi, but I don’t know I can really see a lot of folks bringing their laptops or personal digital assistants to the game and checking e-mail or whatnot,” said Anshu Dua, an industry analyst with Pyramid Research in Cambridge. “You go to these events to get away from your daily life. It’s about entertainment, in the end.”
Brad Bourland, Astros director of information technology, said since the July 2 service launch, “The usage hasn’t been extremely high at this point. The media is probably our heaviest user of it at this point.”
Earlier this year in San Francisco, WiFi helped a Sports Illustrated photographer transmit a photo of slugger Barry Bonds hitting his Willie Mays-tying 660th career home run, just minutes before the magazine’s deadline.
Once they are inspected, laptop computers — banned at some sports venues as a potential hidden bomb or surreptitious camera security risk — are allowed into Minute Maid Park.
But, Bourland said, “The predominant users I think we’re going to see are a lot of people with hand-helds. They’re easier to carry in.”
The WiFi service, operated by Time Warner Inc.’s cable television unit, costs $3.95 for a four-hour session, paid by charge card online. Because of the All-Star break, Red Sox officials were unavailable to comment yesterday on any plans they’re considering to offer WiFi at Fenway Park.
Barry Fougere, the president and chief executive of Colubris, which has sold WiFi systems to more than 500 customers worldwide, said, “People are crazy about these fantasy leagues, and so being able to access all this online broadband information is a nice amenity.” Colubris worked with Cisco Systems Inc. and others to create a system of nearly 100 wireless “hot spots” inside Minute Maid Park that Fougere estimated could support 4,000 or more simultaneous WiFi sessions.
Fougere, who owns Red Sox season tickets, added that a wave of new stadium WiFi deals is in the works, “and not just in Major League Baseball but other sports as well.”
The Red Sox allow cameras and video recorders into Fenway, and “small bags” like laptop bags that can fit under a Fenway seat as long as fans pass through an inspection at Gate B, according to the team website.
Fougere said he could envision WiFi-enabled Sox fans annoying their neighbors less than those with cellphones or caddies of beer, because they’d mainly be tapping on a computer keyboard. “I think this is more of a low-key thing,” Fougere said. “I kind of think of this as being akin to sitting next to the baseball junkie with the headset who’s listening to Jerry Trupiano call the game on WEEI,” the 850 AM sports radio station. “It tends to enhance the experience when you can get a lot of different content while you’re sitting there watching.”
