McLaren Racing, a Formula One team, has named Cisco its official technology partner as part of an expanded partnership between the two companies. Cisco will work with McLaren to upgrade its internal race-day communications to WiFi 6E (Extended), which provides twice the bandwidth of WiFi 6.
McLaren used Cisco’s WebEx video conferencing platform this season to launch a contest in which fans were asked to design the team’s flag. “Being one of the fastest growing sports in the world, Formula 1 is an incredibly lucrative space for Cisco to be involved in,” said Ashley Marusak, Cisco’s global sports sponsorship lead. However, it’s also a very natural place because technological innovation is so intertwined with F1 racing. They’re constantly innovating to give each of the teams the slightest competitive edge. ”
Cisco’s networking solutions will also be installed at McLaren’s headquarters in Surrey, England. Earlier this month, Cisco partnered with Real Madrid to install WiFi 6 at the club’s Bernabeu Stadium. The NFL’s SoFi Stadium in Los Angeles and Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas also run on Cisco’s WiFi 6 infrastructure. Matt Swartz, distinguished engineer at Cisco, will speak about venue connectivity at SportTechie’s State Of The Industry conference in New York on April 12.
“WiFi 6 is the first version of WiFi that had a specific focus on efficiency. Every other version of WiFi prior to that was focused on speeds,” Swartz said Wednesday. “At a racing event where there’s literally thousands of devices, you have a lot of these devices trying to contend for the network […] contention is the biggest problem. So the efficiency aspects of WiFi 6 have been a game changer. WiFi 6E is taking WiFi 6 and extending that into the six gigahertz (GHz) spectrum. It’s like adding extra lanes to the highway.”
