One New Zealand Stadium at Te Kaha – Behind the Scenes Operations

Christchurch is still riding the wave of the new One New Zealand Stadium at Te Kaha, which opened earlier in the year, bringing crowds of visitors, boosting hospitality sales and adding to the story of Christchurch as a thriving city.

The $683 million build came about through hundreds and hundreds of people and organisations working hard, from inception to opening, and our team is incredibly proud to have played our part.

And we're pretty pleased no one noticed!

Every vendor, every point of sale, every ticket scan and every operational team needs a network behind it, and it absolutely has to work, every time.

Te Kaha is operated by Venues Ōtautahi, and we’ve worked with them for a number of years, supporting all of their venues across the city, not just the stadium.

As the stadium project got underway, Dave Gibbon and Andy McDonald worked with Venues Ōtautahi to develop requirements for a network connectivity RFP across all of their venues, and to bring the new stadium into that network. This included documenting the current environment, identifying opportunities to rationalise and standardise it, and working out how best to ensure consistent performance, security and granular management (control over who could access what) for both internal users and external parties.

The focus throughout was to procure a network that was stable, secure and flexible, and one Venues Ōtautahi could manage easily themselves.

Nobody notices that kind of technology when it works, and that's exactly what we want! Nobody thinks about how their card gets processed at the bar or how a ticket scanner talks to the gate system, they just expect it to work, at scale, under pressure, the first time. People only notice when it does not work smoothly.

We're incredibly proud to have played our small part in making this Christchurch icon a special place to visit for events a long way into the future.