Time Warner Cable provides the fiber ring surrounding the arena, connecting to PoE switches in wiring closets. Gigabit Ethernet copper links the switches to the Ruckus access points. All Wi-Fi traffic from the arena routes to a Ruckus ZoneDirector 5000 controller based at TWC's Herndon Data Center, along with the vendor's FlexMaster WLAN management application.

The upgrade to 11n was pushed by the arena's main tenant, the Charlotte Bobcats basketball team, which wanted to support the growing number of Wi-Fi and tablets with reliable bandwidth, and offer fans new wireless services. These mobile devices are . Time Warner Cable, besides having the name rights, also supplied the arena's fiber infrastructure. The cable company worked Ruckus and the WLAN vendor's Georgia-based broadband communications integrator, Arris, to design and install the new WLAN.

The network is designed assuming that 28% of the nearly 20,000 attendees, at full capacity, would be using Wi-Fi, mainly for uploading photos or short video clips, and for sharing with friends via social media sites like Facebook and , according to Lou Lazzaro, vice president of wireless for Time Warner Cable East Region. For non-sports events, like the Democratic National Convention, the center court is covered for stages and additional seating. The only network change for the DNC was adding another handful of access points for this central sector.

The access points can balance the load, so users can be shifted to another access point as needed, says Doug Sabo, product manager for Wi-Fi with Time Warner East Region. "We don't anticipate folks will have a lot of downtime," he says. "In our initial testing, it's fared pretty well. We haven't seen that capacity max out."

The companies ran a detailed site survey initially, and then began running extensive simulations that mimicked real-world performance arena attendees to determine the optimal access point deployment. It was this work that led to the new antenna design, according to Ruckus co-founder and CTO Bill Kish.