Project Madison Square Garden

Three Building Campus for Madison Square Garden Arena

This client has an entertainment venue comprised of an arena, fine arts Center and convention center in one campus. The local area network primarily supports operations of the venue, visitors and vendors on-site that would typically be found in such an environment.

The upgrade consisted of replacing 27 switches with the Meraki MS420 as the core switches located in the MDF at the Main buildings, the Meraki MS320 primary L3 switch within each IDF, and Meraki MS220 switches L2 only for all other connections.

The upgrade also consisted of replacing 87 wireless access points with the Meraki MR18 in the Meraki MR26 APs, after making this upgrade the wired and wireless networks were able to support all users that showed up for multiple high-traffic shows and conferences (Up to 5000 people) with Meraki Mesh Technology.

In this process we also were able to replace the firewall solution, wireless concentrator, wireless pay-as-you-go management equipment with the Meraki MX100 firewall solution (we had a second unit for redundancy that will be changed over upon discovery of an issue). This changed the way the internal IT staff was able to support this large venue, providing them with complete control both inside and outside the facility for real-time modifications of the network allowing for much better response to client requests.

I was the pre-sales engineer, build engineer, deployment engineer, post employment engineer and trainer for this project. Thanks to my efforts the client requested a five-year service contract for the organization. This solution has empowered the internal IT team to do what three external consulting companies were charging them for and this upgrade is saving them a great deal of money and time.

The name of the client and IP information was changed for identity protection.