- HPE fully replaced Cisco as the networking provider at The Ryder Cup
- HPE told Fierce that it was like supporting "a small city" when networking the golf tournament
- The provider supplied a 5G private network - using all its own kit - for the competition
While the 2025 Ryder Cup was infamous for the advent of golf hooliganism on the Bethpage Black Course in Farmingdale, New York, course, a lot was actually going on out of the public gaze. To wit, HPE fully replaced Cisco as the networking provider for the tournament, supplying Wi-Fi, a private 5G network and AI to the officials and fans on site.
James Robertson, VP and technologist strategist for the office of the CTO at Aruba, a HPE company, said that company had deployed, "one of largest — if not the largest — temporary networks in the world," at the Bethpage Black, which encompasses 1,500 acres.
Private 5G on the green
Robertson said that HPE set up an enterprise-grade, Citizens Broadband Radio Service (CBRS) network using "three nodes of private 5G ... to cover the whole course." He added that HPE used its own 5G radios and core for the network from Athonet, a company that HPE bought in February 2023.
The logistics to support this kind of massive temporary network are enormous. Jeff Weaver, wireless CTO at HPE, said that systems integrator Safari Solutions laid out a strengthened fiber cable, for uplink and downlink, to enable Wi-Fi access points and cellular nodes around the golf course. Interestingly, he noted that there was just an up-and-down fiber link with no redundancy on the site.
This enables the point-of-sale and AI applications that help pay for the tournament. "A lot of what we've done at The Ryder Cup is really a showcase for what is the art of the possible when you start to bring compute, storage and AI processing together to solve real-world problems for what is really this temporary city that we've set up," said Robertson.
The network behind the greens
On the rainy Thursday that Fierce was in Bethpage, your correspondent and assorted other tech journos, tramped around the green and into the foliage where the networking control center was located. Weaver said that HPE installed 130 switches to forward data around the network.
On the day we we visited, there were over 5,000 active clients on the network, supported by 719 devices. HPE said that over 250,000 people would visit the course during the week of The Ryder Cup.