Mon, June 18, 2007 — Computerworld — With the city of Boston planning a municipal Wi-Fi network, Steven Conley, IT director for the Boston Red Sox baseball team, is bracing himself for possible interference with fabled Fenway Park's own Wi-Fi hotspot.

"Frankly, I don't want these municipal wireless systems to happen. I'd rather they all just go away," Conley said during a session at the MuniWireless 2007: New England conference in Newton, Mass., this week.

Conley added that he was speaking in jest—somewhat.

"I know it has to happen, but I don't want it," he said, referring to the planned development of the Boston Wi-Fi network, as well as a separate one in neighboring Brookline. Fenway Park, the home of the Red Sox, is located in a neighborhood near the border of Boston and Brookline.

The Red Sox first installed Wi-Fi technology in Fenway's main press box in 2003. Since then, the team has added a separate Wi-Fi network for its own workers, plus another network to support wireless ticket-scanning as well as in-seat ordering of food and drinks in some sections of the ballpark.

Conley described some incidents of Wi-Fi interference he has already had to deal with. For example, last winter's signing of Japanese pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka has attracted an onslaught of media coverage on the days he is scheduled to pitch, sometimes resulting in as many as 25 television news trucks being parked near Fenway. The trucks send microwave signals to antennas on the roofs of four nearby high-rise buildings in order to transmit video.

But Conley said the microwave signals use the same spectrum as Wi-Fi transmissions. And at times, signals sent from the trucks bounce back off buildings or metal objects, he said. That has wiped out Wi-Fi coverage in the press box as well as the Wi-Fi-based TV remote controls used by the team's owners in their suites at the park.

Diagnosing the microwave interference problems wasn't easy, according to Conley. "The only way we figured it out was with a spectrum analyzer," he said. So far, the microwave transmissions continue to get top priority over Wi-Fi, but Conley said he at least now understands what's going on.

Another problem cropped up in the spring after the Red Sox installed a new family seating area consisting of metal bleachers on the right-field roof. Because of the metal, "we found the wireless signal shot into right field," Conley said.

Problems like that are inevitable with Wi-Fi, he added. "I don't want to sound like Chicken Little, but things can happen," he said. "There's just going to be stuff that's weird."