The days of simply sitting in front of a TV and watching a pro basketball game are long gone. Now your game experience probably includes following real-time stats and player spotlights on your phone, along with keeping an eye on a different game on a tablet or laptop nearby whose outcome could move your favorite team up or down in the rankings.
That requires an enormous and ever-growing amount of data and coordination. To keep up with that demand and to anticipate tomorrow’s needs, the National Basketball Association, Women’s National Basketball Association and AT&T are installing the fourth generation of their High Speed Arena Network infrastructure starting with the 2026-27 season,
“It’s more, more, more,” said Ken DeGennaro, executive vice president of media operations and technology at the NBA, explaining the demands the organization sees every time two teams tip-off. “More video angles, higher density video angles, video content, higher frame video, higher quality video, all of that.”
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The fourth-gen network is being installed in all 30 venues where the NBA operates, starting with the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, Barclays Center in New York City, United Center in Chicago, American Airlines Center in Dallas, State Farm Arena in Atlanta and Crypto.com Arena in Los Angeles. The official launch of the updated HSAN will happen in July 2027.
A full-court press of live data
The network upgrade will include more than 68,000 miles of AT&T fiber and all new networking equipment at the venues. That will provide four times the bandwidth as the existing infrastructure.
DeGennaro said an average game uses about 118 streams of high-quality, low-latency data. “The majority of the video content comes back as uncompressed video at about 250 megabits per second per stream, so it’s quite a bit of throughput bandwidth on the network,” he said.
That includes the live broadcast video, in-arena content, studio programming by the league and regional sports networks, mobile viewing content and virtual signage. Those streams are also split out for redundancy and resiliency.
“We’ve gone from point-to-point networks to a full network that allows for greater reliability and scalability across all of our ingest and distribution channels,” DeGennaro said.
The work to upgrade the venues goes beyond installing new server racks and fresh fiber, though those are essential components. In some locations, that means breaking ground to bring fiber-filled conduit into the venue from different directions so it doesn’t all pass through a single potential failure point.
Joe Drygas, vice president of global enterprise solutions at AT&T Business, pointed to the increased capacity and the diverse architecture of data centers that can immediately pick up the slack if needed. AT&T has a dedicated engineering unit running network telemetry 24/7, predictive capacity modeling and automated traffic rerouting around bottlenecks.
“Ultimately, what you can’t have is any kind of disruption during games,” Drygas said, especially when multiple games are happening simultaneously. “Once the season starts across all these teams, it’s go time.”
Although the HSAN is focused on getting the NBA’s content out to the world, Drygas said AT&T is also focused on the overall network experience for fans, too, including the company’s Turbo Live service for prioritizing mobile data in highly congested environments like games and concerts.
“[In the venue] one of the first things people do is have their phones out. They’re taking videos, they’re live streaming, a lot of [data] is uploading out from the venue,” said Drygas. “So it’s really changed the way we architect these networks, so [the NBA] absolutely could leverage that and take advantage of other uses.”
Both Drygas and DeGennaro reiterated that they’re also looking ahead to additional venues that will need to be outfitted, both in the US and across the globe, as professional basketball expands.
“When we built out our first version of the high-speed arena network, we would have never envisioned where we are today,” said DeGennaro. He said the collaboration between the NBA and AT&T lets them keep up with fan demand.
NBA, WNBA and AT&T also extend their marketing agreement
In addition to the fourth-generation HSAN announcement, AT&T, the NBA and the WNBA extended their marketing partnership, with AT&T serving as the leagues’ Official Connectivity Partner. That extends to the NBA G League, USA Basketball and NBA Take-Two Media.
“The WNBA’s growth has been incredible to be a part of, and it takes partners who are committed to investing in the game and its future,” said A’ja Wilson, three-time WNBA Champion, five-time Kia WNBA MVP and Las Vegas Aces center, in a statement. “AT&T has consistently shown up for our league, our players and our fans.”