Cisco Meraki Powers Cincinnati Open Fan Experience | Cisco Live 2026

Hey everyone. We're back here at Cisco Live! in Mandalay Bay, Las Vegas, continuing our coverage of what's been an action-packed here with, as you would imagine, a lot of agentic AI, but a lot of technology.

When you're Cisco and you're making a big statement about the future of the agentic, of the AI infrastructure space, you expect this kind of turnout, this kind of information. Let me introduce you to our next guest. His name is Robert Nichols.

Robert, welcome. Thank you for having me. Thank you for coming on.

Robert, you're with the... Well, Cincinnati Open is the marquee event, but it's actually the Cincinnati Tennis Group or... Yes, absolutely.

The Cincinnati Tennis is actually part of a larger conglomerate as well, which is BMOC Sports and Entertainment, which is actually based out of South Carolina. They have also a tennis tournament down there. Uh-huh.

Also Meraki, with the Credit One Charleston Open down there. Okay. But the Cincinnati Open is what I would say is one of the largest tennis tournaments in the world.

ATP Masters 1000, WTA 1000. Of course, you come to Cisco Live! to talk about tennis, right?

But- Well, I love talking about tennis, but that's okay. Right. And so the story, what my involvement is with Cincinnati Tennis is to provide that fundamental technology that helps expand and elevate the fan experience and the player experience as well from a hospitality lens.

So that's my role. We didn't mention your title, though. Oh, I am Principal Technical Architect for Cincinnati Tennis.

There we go. Principal Technical- The home of the Cincinnati Open, the heart of tennis. I love it.

I live down in South Florida, and we recently, they've been trying to up the game on the Miami Open. Oh, yeah. Yeah, they set up a whole complex now near the Dolphins Hard Rock Stadium, and it's nice.

I go up to New York every year, too, for the US Open. Oh, fantastic. Yeah.

That's an event. You should come to Cincinnati. We- You know what?

I'm an invite away. Okay. Robert, there are some people, though, who aren't tennis fans, and they're saying, "It's people with rackets hitting balls.

" But those are people who don't go to tennis- Absolutely. Yeah, that's right ... tournaments.

And it's not just tennis, it's frankly any sports and entertainment event- Absolutely ... today in the world. People go there, they expect their phones to work.

They expect to have Wi-Fi. They expect to be getting text messages and taking videos and posting stuff on social media. And if they don't, it's like when you fly in a plane now and the internet don't work.

What do you mean I'm 35,000 feet in the air going 500 miles an hour? I want my internet, man. Precisely.

I get it. And it's for that exact reason. We have people coming from all over the world who are coming in with their cell phones.

They don't necessarily work on a 5G in the United States, and especially in the Midwest. So as a result of that, we had to roll out a world-class Wi-Fi platform. But we had to do it very rapidly, and that's part of what I'm here to talk about this week.

Last year, we took on a very ambitious and aggressive and so challenging of a $260 million renovation transformation of our campus, doubling the size. You're kidding me. Doubling the size from 20 to 40 acres, starting from scratch, because our aging infrastructure was so old.

It was 10, 15 years old. We had also cable trays running along the side of the stadium that I thought looked beautiful. I thought they were great.

But when you're trying to elevate the fan experience and the player experience or whatever else you're trying to do, hospitality, there's nothing you can do to a cable tray to make that work. No. So in a single day or hour, we chopped those cable trays, fell to the ground in 40 years of cabling, coax- Gone ...

history. Gone. We're starting from scratch.

We had to rerun all of it. And for all of the people who are infrastructure engineers and that type of thing, we actually ended up rerunning all that underground, 40 miles of PVC conduit, 28 manholes, hundreds of hand holes, and then we reran 17 miles of fiber optic cabling- Wow ... 5,000 strands, single mode, thankfully.

We were on multi-mode before. Actually, the cable trays were a blessing there for me. Yeah.

90 miles of copper to reconnect everything together. Holy mackerel. And then we put out this Meraki network.

And the crazy part about it is the actual whole transformation had to be done in 11 months, and that's the construction. We didn't get access to even start putting in our technology four months. We didn't get access to the areas until four or five, until April.

Cincinnati Open is a prestigious world-class event. It draws in 89 million viewers across 187 countries around the globe. The spotlight comes on, and it was coming.

In late July, the players are coming, tennis is going to play. Whether your Wi-Fi is working or not. That's right.

And for the Wi-Fi, we then rolled out as part of that four-year thing, or four-month thing, 320 access points for public Wi-Fi. Oh my gosh. One of the large, if not the largest Meraki venueWe are one of the largest, and we had 100 switches distributed across 40 acres, again, in four months.

320 access points, 175 Meraki AP cameras. And if it wasn't a cloud-managed deployment, we would never have made it. You would've never done it.

The cloud deployment allowed us to make it, and we made it in... We're thrilled with making it to the finish line and the results of it. We've worked hard.

I will tell you, you didn't know this, but I'm actually the president of the HOA where I live. Oh. And I'm a tech guy.

Okay. We had the worst connectivity. Oh.

And I under... Not quite 40 acres. Yeah.

But I undertook to upgrade us to fiber, and we had the same thing. Putting the big orange things that- Oh, yeah ... the black ones go in, and then in the black ones, the individual fibers.

Oh, man. The main trunks hooked into the clubhouses and the access gates and every unit. I feel your pain.

I feel your pain. Well, I call it that I was actually... We had to dig up the whole compound.

Okay? So did we. Because not only was it our infrastructure, over those first seven, eight months, they had to replace everything from a standpoint of plumbing, electricity.

Utility. Because once you... The very first day they broke ground, they hit a water main.

That's right. County came, shut the water down. Oh, no.

Then we had to have a boil water alert. I feel your pain. Oh, yeah.

I've been there. I know, right. I've been there.

Not only that, because I was the HOA president and it's South Florida, I had to go promise these people that once their new fiber's up, I'll come in and make sure their passwords work. Well, you did the job, baby. So I became- You did a great job ...

I became the IT guy. Yeah, well, good. But I hear you.

Well, there you go. But no kidding around. We have up to 10 gig fiber.

Mm-hmm. Not that people need 10 gig fiber at their home today, but give us a sense of the bandwidth of the capacity of this system. Well, let me give you the actual capacity that was actually utilized, because that's really the story here.

That's what it was, right. During the... We build this thing for the Open, okay?

Which, I'll go through the details of what this bandwidth is used for, but during the off-season, we don't have that. We're a small organization otherwise. You was.

When we grow up into the Open, we have thousands of people coming in as contractors. We have 2,000 volunteers- Wow ... who come in, who add to the personality of the event.

They're the best volunteers in tennis in my book. But here's the thing, 150, maybe 100 megabit throughput during the off-season, just standard office use. Once the players show up with their families, their coaches, the entourages, the week or two before.

They're doing their practices. They're coming there. They're on the venue.

They're loving the venue, by the way, and enjoying it. Well, they also like to be entertained. Well, that in addition to this- Sure, yeah ...

once the fans get there, and you get social media content, 400 million impressions over the course of that timeframe, and it's a big deal. So you got all that stuff going on. The sustained throughput, including stuff like you mentioned, we were talking briefly before about some technology that was used.

Those vendors actually do live streaming of their video stuff out. All these things are pushing stuff out and pulling stuff in. We get a sustained throughput of about two teragigabit, two gigabit per second sustained.

So that's a- Sustained ... lot. That's not your spike.

Right. That's your sustained. You had to have something that could handle that sustain, and then it spiked to five gigabit and 10 gigabit.

And most of it, that's wireless into wired and everything else. That's right. Precisely.

And so we were an internet service provider of the same size as a fairly large data center. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, fairly large data center in today's world and in today's budgets are- Oh, my gosh. It's totally different ... it's a whole different...

That's a whole different scale. Yeah. You're talking about ones the size of Manhattan or something, right?

Mm. But all kidding aside, it is. It's like it's all of a sudden providing connectivity to a small town.

And every year, the utilization grows exponentially. And this is why we had to make a shift prior to this renovation or this transformation. The foundation of this network had to be strong.

Sure. Resilient. And with the Meraki platform, we've gained a lot of these things with Cisco working with them.

Yeah. And I'll get a little techy here for you. It's like we are a north-south traffic type group.

Okay. What's more important is uptime. Yeah.

And performance. So we have to maintain that throughput, but we can't have it go down at all. You can't have it down at all, right.

It's got to be invisible. It has to be invisible, and if it's invisible, then the experience is impacted. And it goes the other way as well.

Yeah. If it's not invisible- So if it goes down, that's resilient. So what we ended up doing was a dual MDF design within our stadium, which is very great, because we have this vast campus.

So we had a main primary MDF, which is on its own power. Okay. It's owned.

It had the fiber coming in from the internet on the outside source in one direction. We had another location, same situation. Totally redundant.

Totally redundant from an infrastructure standpoint, cabling standpoint for internet. We said, "Why not do a dual MDF? And but we want to do it on Meraki," and that's what we chose to do.

Well, what we're seeing with Cisco and their advancements with the Meraki hardware using the Cisco Catalyst 9300-M, we were able to do spanning tree. The spanning tree piece was already there. MST was always there with Meraki, but what our problem is, is that we have a public Wi-Fi, right?

It's, yeah. We have- It's wide open ... with 10 to 14,000 people on that public Wi-Fi across 320 access points.

They're consuming a lot of processing. So we set up in the secondary MDFA dedicated public firewall, public Wi-Fi firewall I was right. So you had to have something up for this.

Okay And then we had our HA pair for firewalls for the mission-critical stuff running through the primary and then backed up. Meraki made it very seamless. So it's almost two or three different networks here.

Oh, yeah. It's amazing. But from a standpoint of other things like point of sale, all those things But that's again, another thing.

Yeah IPTV, multicast TV, we had to have these things running. Those are primary. But recently, with the Cisco IOS XE firmware release from Meraki, running on the Catalyst switches, the 9300 Catalyst switches hardware, but it's Meraki cloud managed, they enabled and they're starting to apply Cisco DNA- To the whole thing ...

features. Right. And one of the ones that we're utilizing is RPVST Plus.

You know what that stands for? No. Rapid Per VLAN Spanning Tree.

Just so you need. And you know what that is? I can then say, on every single switch, I set up an uplink to each one.

Fiber goes to the MDF primary, the other fiber goes to the secondary MDF, and I tell that switch through the RPVST Plus, that VLAN for the public Wi-Fi go to the secondary. Everything else go to the primary. Goes to the QoS.

All that traffic goes there and out that firewall and back, and it doesn't even touch the primary, and that- That's intelligent ... and for us, that's the type of capabilities we need, and it gave- That's what you're going to need. Absolutely And those are the capabilities that Cisco Meraki gave us, as well as being able to meet the timeline.

That's the crazy part. I love it. Look, our audience is techy.

They're going to appreciate that. For those of you, though, who aren't, you have no... This is not simple stuff you're talking about.

If you don't mind, I want to talk AI. I'll mention the AI word to you. Okay.

Now, look, you were probably planning this move before agentic burst out- Oh, gosh ... the last six months or whatever. Yeah.

But what effect do you think that agentics and AI is going to have on your network, on performance, on expectations of people? It's a great question. We don't know across the industry.

Who knows? I know. Agentic AI really exploded in the enterprise industry in October.

Yeah. If you think about it. I just absolutely can't believe how much that has shifted in the last six, seven months.

So quickly. And I do think that the fundamental shift is going to impact every single aspect of- No doubt ... the fan experience and other types of things.

Agentic AI can be utilized for all different types of stuff for improving the back end stuff. Now, as far as like what we're talking about here, as far as agentic AI and those other types of pieces, those are based upon the neural network type design that's come out and is so popular nowadays. But from...

We've been using AI in tennis and across the compound for a lot of things. But there's a couple cool AI things or analytical things that I'd like to share with you that are based- Go ahead ... on Cisco partners.

So one of the things that's a logistical piece for us at a tennis tournament, it's unlike other sporting events like a football or a baseball game where you go for one game and then you leave. Right. We have a multiple session day.

Day session, night session. The people in the day session come to the stadium, they get their ticket for the center court, but they can also go to the rest of the grounds and watch practice courts and do all these- That's why I love it. Oh, it's fantastic.

The second session then becomes a night session. Those day session people have to leave the center court, and then the second session comes in. But these people who are in the day session can stay.

How many people will stay? Okay. Well, that's been a challenge because up until now, what we had was the ticket scanning data.

Yeah. So now what we have done is we have partnered with another Cisco partner, WaitTime. Okay.

And we've implemented Meraki cameras everywhere. We put the cameras on the gates overhead, not looking at faces, but looking at the tops of heads. As people come in- It's counting ingress and egress ...

That's correct. And we have within 1 to 2% an accurate occupancy on a thing. Do you realize what that does for us logistically?

It's game changing. It's huge. Yeah.

Parking, overall like food and beverage, how much stuff do we have to have on ice? How much stuff- Yeah ... you know?

No, it's amazing. It's huge to have that number. But I want to emphasize, you're doing it, it's truly anonymous.

You're just counting heads. That's right. Yeah.

We're not looking at faces saying, "Oh, Robert's there, and he's still there. Oh, Robert was there in the morning. " That's right.

It's just a question of numbers going in and out. And we can use it- For all people to think Big Brother's watching them. That's correct.

And it's on the top of the head on every camera technology that we might do that with. And that's really the only analytics that we do that with. Because we need it for fan experience.

Everything we do is for the fan experience. So, we may consider to use the same product, WaitTime, which is named that, by the way, because a beer line. The owner- How long ...

missed out on a soccer shot because he went to the beer line- Right ... in overtime, and- Been there, done that too ... So WaitTime actually does the same thing with lines and tells you how long the line is going to take for you to get your beer.

And it also tells you how much of the space is full. Right. Which is huge for us because we have all these stadiums, just like at other venues- They're open ...

where they can go in for free. " And then put that on the app with API integration. All this stuff is cloud integrated, and Meraki allows us to do that.

So again, if you don't go to a modern tennis tournament like this or similar kind of things, you don't understand how enhanced the experience is when you have an app like that. Oh, yeah. So I'm in Florida, I mentioned it before.

This, to me, was one of the biggest likeDisney, Universal at the theme parks. Yeah. No way you could look on an app and see what was the wait here, what was the wait there, when you got screaming kids.

You'd want to- That's a big deal. It's a big deal. " It's life and death.

Right. It's life and death. Exactly.

Yeah. That's right. And- I love it ...

yeah, no, that's one of the type of technology that we can implement now that it's more cloud-based. And, doing the multicast piece, we went from old analog amplifiers, that's what we had for 30, 40 years, and with this opportunity, we were able to put in all digital Dante amplifiers using multicast, again, running fabulously on Meraki equipment. Yes, multicast works great on it, and it not only works great, it works better than what other AV providers have seen.

And we're thrilled with the performance of that piece of it. Love it. So, to continue that thought, though, fan experience, music.

Oh my gosh, to be able to take a music source that's over here on this stage and be able to say, "Okay, I don't want to just play it on these speakers here. " Or the match has a court on there, and we got a line of people outside the ticket gate- And we want music out- We want to play- ... in there ...

we want to play the broadcast, so that match- Yeah ... on those speakers out there, we can do that now with the touch of a button, and we couldn't do that before. Well, the day's coming where the agent will do that for you too.

Oh, that's right. Based upon... Just tell the agent, "We got people lined up.

" That's exactly the problem. That's where you're probably going to see the agentic AI take over more- Yeah ... is those pieces where agentic AI can interpret and make adjustments and- In real time.

Yeah, in real time. And they're doing that already with, actually, the networking side and with other types of things, but with the agentic AI piece within broadcast, I can only imagine where that could go. I mean, that would- So I will tell you, my son's a sports broadcaster for cable- Oh, really?

Okay ... for cable down here. Crazy what they're doing with- Yeah ...

because when you're talking about, and you see this in tennis, baseball, whatever, multi-camera, and I don't know if you've ever been in a truck in the back. Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

I mean, we have a TV compound. So you know what- Yeah ... chaos that is.

It's a controlled chaos. What do you think those cable trays are for- Yeah, exactly ... and was for running SIMTY and XLR cable from the- Yeah.

Exactly ... trailer to the camera. Exactly.

That was what it was for. But it was controlled chaos, right? It was.

Yeah. How quick should I switch to this one? Now, they're using agents for this now.

Oh, really? Yeah. Like, to prioritize a camera view?

Yeah, see that would make sense to me. Based upon... I'll be honest, I haven't seen it in tennis yet.

I've seen it for baseball. Yeah. Sure.

Absolutely. Yeah. And makes a difference.

Makes a huge difference. Yeah. I can only imagine, the level that- Yeah ...

again, it's about the experience, and especially in sporting venues, it's about the experience. And, if the fan gets a better experience online, you're going to get more viewership, you're going to get more, and that's what- And you got happy people, happier fans. Happy fans make for better tournaments.

That's right. Robert, when's the next Cincinnati Open? The next Cincinnati Open is in, it's actually August 8th.

Coming up. It's coming up, and it's the precursor- Right after Black Hat here in Vegas. Head to- Yeah ...

Cincinnati. There you go, and the US Open's right after it. We're always- Yes, it is ...

a precursor right there. We're always a warm-up. Uh-huh.

We're very proud to be in that spot. It's like that's what we do. And the one thing that I want to mention is that the players, because of the efforts we made, voted us as ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 Tournament of the Year.

Year. And I want to say that because our organization takes tennis very personally, and we didn't just make this investment just for the campus, but it was also for the tennis venue itself, but for a tennis community. And this meant a lot to us because the other ATP, Indian Wells, Miami Open that you mentioned- Yeah ...

Rome, Madrid, that do men and women on the same week, or the same time, we're inspired by these groups. They challenge us to be better. Yeah.

And so when we won that award, we were nothing but humble and, but we- It sounds like well-deserved, though, too. Yeah, to get that type of acknowledgement from the players meant a lot. We were also nominated for Sports Business Journal Sporting Venue of the Year.

Really? We didn't win, but we're very proud of that one, because that's a kudos. You know what they say, when you make the finals, they're all winners.

And I'm going to say one last thing. Our Credit One Stadium down in Charleston, the Credit One Charleston Open- The next project? Yeah, well, no, that's in March.

That's clay. That's the first one. No, but I'm saying have you modernized that one yet?

That is Meraki as well. Okay. And we just expanded the Wi-Fi down there.

Okay. And we used the Meraki AI to help tune it. Beautiful.

Which is fantastic. They won WTA 500 Series Tournament of the Year. Really?

Again, players voted in two, three years. So we're very proud of this. Again, we're very passionate- It shows ...

and it's personal for us here to do that. I see it in your passion. So.

Robert, thanks for coming on here, man. No, thank you again. It's a pleasure.

Hey, Robert Nichols, he's the reason the Cincinnati Open looks as good as it does. We're going to take a break here at Cisco Live. We're going to be back with more coverage.

Stay tuned. You're watching Techstrong TV.