Vallarta.- The victory of the Spanish golfer Jon Rahm Mexico in the Mexico Open at Vidanta 2022 vibrated on a skeleton valued at 11.6 million pesos. That is what the company Totalplay Empresarial invested in the construction of the technology structure behind the event with the aim of providing Internet connection to the audience, the media and the technological accessories of the PGA Tour.
“It is the Top 1 investment of Totalplay Empresarial. It is a great investment because of the size, simply because of the dimension of a golf course of kilometers that you cannot compare with the investment of a soccer or baseball stadium and the number of people that are handled at the same time. In a stadium it is temporary, the time is shorter but the perimeter is smaller and here, with the length and distance, the investment of buried fiber optics is very large, of an entire channeling, of being careful with the grass, everything it had to be perfect as if there were no infrastructure underneath”, Susana Lozano, Director of Communication at the Regional Level of Totalplay Empresarial, describes to this newspaper.
The technology company currently owns more than 20 stadiums between the Mexican Baseball League (LMB), the Mexican Pacific League (LMP) and Liga MX, while in golf it has had a stake in the infrastructure of the golf courses. Chapultepec and the Estrella de Mar de Mazatlán, but its presence in the 7,456 yards of Vidanta, in Vallarta, make it the highest investment and with “world class” work.
“We can say that it is a world-class structure. Comparing it with another development is complex because the technologies are always different, but due to the complexity of the place and the situation in which the supply and equipment are today, we managed to have everything to be able to get to this event without any technological restriction, it is a Construction that is at the level of a stadium in the United States and at the level of Mexican golf would enter the top of the best”, adds Jonathan Guzmán, manager of Totalplay Empresarial in Puerto Vallarta, part of Guadalajara, Nayarit and Colima.
The essential infrastructure at Vidanta was the implementation of 13 kilometers of fiber optics and 80 wi-fi access points to improve connectivity; this doubles what they had done in their most important work in golf, which had been in Chapultepec, where they built seven kilometers and 45 access points, almost half the figures for Vallarta. For its part, in the Estrella de Mar complex in Mazatlan, “it was a much quieter investment,” says Susana Lozano, because it was only about adapting facilities for the press and the VIP hospitality area.
Although the body of engineers and architects admits that they worked at full speed in a period of three months “and from scratch”, the result of the Vidanta complex was to have the capacity for up to 2,000 devices to be simultaneously connected to the internet at the service of fans. , media and the PGA Tour; They highlight that only in the Media Center files were uploaded to the network with a weight of up to eight gigabytes, while only in Thursday’s coverage they had 900 connected devices.
Golf has allowed them to innovate in technological matters with completely different needs than baseball and soccer, where connectivity demands a larger agglomeration of fans but in a shorter period of time. Here the point was to build a network of many kilometers and to have capacity on a larger time scale.
“Because of the distances, the number of fans and the deployment of technical people that we had to do, even from nature, we even got crocodiles, we were working with all those bad weather. We have too many people involved, including a monitoring room with all the engineers checking that the network is totally healthy”, Lozano highlighted. In total, more than 80 people collaborated in the construction of the structure.
The directive also indicates that the maintenance costs will be much lower than those 11.6 million pesos, since the access points were uninstalled as soon as the tournament ended to take care of their integrity, since it describes that they can be damaged by the sun. Once the Vidanta Open is resumed in 2023, they will be placed again, although the investment cost for maintenance in the next two years that the tournament will last at this venue “will be minimal.”
For Jonathan Guzmán, the company met the expectations of golf fans who gathered to see Jon Rahm’s triumph in Vallarta: “Today people are looking for stability, security in connectivity and Totalplay is meeting those customer requests . People upload tik toks, streams and that stresses our boxes, puts the level request to the limit and that gives us an idea of how stable the structure of a place should be. Today we can say that we comply with stability, security and coverage.”
The challenge at Vidanta was to place the entire fiber optic network without damaging the aesthetics of the field. They built it from scratch but with the responsibility of not leaving anything visible in the underground areas and ensuring that there are no risks with the aerial cables.
The technology they are using is from Huawei, a Chinese company that has entered the sport to be the technological support of entities such as LaLiga (Spanish first division), the main cricket league in India and the first soccer division in Belgium.