Sports-anchored mixed-use development is changing the economics of venue ownership. Andrew believes it will also change how owners think about connectivity.
For much of the last two decades, the wireless challenge in sports was relatively contained. Build enough capacity inside the venue to serve tens of thousands of fans, support increasingly mobile operations and keep pace with the steady growth of data consumption.
That problem has not gone away. But Thierry Chau, vice president of worldwide venue development at Andrew, sees another challenge emerging around it.
As teams increasingly develop stadiums alongside restaurants, hotels, residences, offices, retail and public gathering spaces, connectivity can no longer be planned entirely around the stadium itself. The technology serving the venue increasingly needs to support a much larger economic ecosystem.
For Chau, the reason starts well before DAS. His argument begins with a change in how people spend their time.
The rise of the sports district
Traditional shopping malls once functioned as community gathering places. Their department-store anchors generated traffic that supported restaurants, entertainment and surrounding retail. But e-commerce, smartphones, delivery services, ride sharing and streaming have steadily weakened that model.
Live sports occupy a different position.
The shopping experience can move online. Food can arrive at the door. Entertainment can be streamed at home. The energy and communal experience of attending a live sporting event is much harder to reproduce.
That makes a stadium or arena a potentially powerful anchor for a new kind of mixed-use development.
Chau sees sports-anchored districts as an extension of the experience economy, with venues creating the traffic that once came from traditional retail anchors. The surrounding real estate then gives ownership an opportunity to capture more of what happens before and after the event.
The model is already becoming more common. Chau pointed to dozens of announced sports-anchored mixed-use projects and a coming wave of teams approaching lease expirations that could create additional opportunities for new stadium and district development.
The business model is also different.
Traditional sports revenues such as tickets, media rights and sponsorship are mature and closely tied to the team and event calendar. Mixed-use development creates another source of economic value, one tied to real estate, year-round activity and consumer spending outside the building.
Chau points to Atlanta as one of the clearest examples.
Because Atlanta Braves Holdings is publicly traded, its results provide unusual visibility into the economics of a sports-anchored development. In Chau’s analysis, The Battery represented roughly 13 percent of company revenue in 2025 but approximately 64 percent of operating income before depreciation and amortization.
The implication is significant. A comparatively small portion of revenue can produce a disproportionately large share of operating profit while reducing dependence on attendance and team performance.
There is another number Chau finds important: hundreds of annual events at The Battery outside the baseball schedule.
Some may be large activations. Others may be as simple as yoga in a public plaza. Either way, the district is being used far more often than the stadium itself.
That is where the economics begin to intersect with technology.
The mobile economy follows the fan outside the venue
A modern stadium visit already depends heavily on the phone.
Parking credentials, mobile tickets, payments, wayfinding, social media, loyalty programs, food ordering and other services increasingly assume reliable connectivity. Chau argues that the mixed-use district extends those expectations beyond the gates.
A fan may arrive early, pay for parking with a QR code, visit a restaurant, receive a text when a table becomes available, use a team or district application, attend an event and remain in the area afterward.
Each interaction may be small. Together they form the commercial experience the district is trying to create.
If the connection fails, the digital business model can fail with it.
That makes wireless service less of a fan amenity and more of an underlying operating requirement.
Chau said this distinction becomes particularly evident when developers think primarily about Wi-Fi. Cellular service may be taken for granted because it is generally perceived as something provided by the mobile operators. But garages, concrete structures, buildings and other environments can interfere with outdoor cellular coverage, often at exactly the points where customers are expected to complete mobile transactions.
DAS used to be about getting signal. Then it became about getting capacity. Now venues are saying: this infrastructure is too strategic for us not to understand and influence
Thierry Chau, Andrew
The planning question therefore becomes less about choosing Wi-Fi or DAS and more about understanding what users will be doing, where they will be doing it and which connectivity layer must support each use case.
One district, many RF environments
That gets complicated quickly.
A stadium bowl can contain 60,000 or 80,000 people in a relatively small area. A hotel, office building or residential tower has entirely different density and usage characteristics. Parking structures, retail spaces, outdoor plazas and transit areas introduce still more conditions.
The same development can therefore contain high-density, medium-density and low-density RF environments within a few hundred yards of one another.
Chau argues that they should not all be treated the same.
Inside a stadium, cellular systems may use different power levels and sectorization strategies depending on whether the goal is to cover seating, concourses, suites, the field or back-of-house areas. Outside the venue, the architecture can include indoor DAS, small cells, traditional macro coverage or other technologies depending on the environment.
The important point is not that DAS should simply expand across every part of the district.
It is that wireless planning should begin with the full development.
The stadium may remain the technology anchor, but the network architecture has to account for a much larger collection of users, buildings, applications and operating models.
A broader definition of convergence
That development is occurring at the same time that the underlying technology is becoming more flexible.
Chau identifies several parallel changes: converged IP networks inside venues, continued growth in mobile-first applications, additional licensed and unlicensed spectrum, shared spectrum such as CBRS, more digital interfaces between cellular infrastructure components and emerging use of AI for network planning and optimization.
None of those developments makes one wireless technology sufficient by itself.
Chau rejects the idea that greater cellular capacity eliminates the need for Wi-Fi. His view is that demand will continue increasing and that large venues will benefit from every practical source of capacity, including licensed cellular spectrum, unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum and shared spectrum.
Spectrum is beachfront property.
Thierry Chau, Andrew
You never want less of it.
The more interesting convergence may therefore occur at the planning level.
Instead of asking whether a project needs Wi-Fi or DAS, owners can begin with the applications, economics and user journey, then determine the combination of wireless systems needed to support them.
That becomes even more important as the experience extends into the district.
The funding model may not follow
There is, however, a significant difference between extending stadium connectivity and extending the way stadium connectivity is financed.
Major NFL and other Tier 1 venues remain important to mobile operators. Poor cellular service inside a marquee venue can create a substantial customer and brand problem, giving carriers a reason to invest.
Chau says the surrounding mixed-use district is a harder proposition.
From a carrier’s perspective, the business impact of better coverage in restaurants, residences, parking structures or retail environments may not justify the same level of investment. From the owner’s perspective, however, those areas may be essential to the commercial strategy of the development.
That creates a misalignment.
The more important connectivity becomes to the owner’s business model, the less reasonable it may be to assume that someone else will pay for all of it.
Chau said conversations with developers increasingly require walking through the specific business activities that depend on connectivity and explaining why the economics of the district differ from those of the stadium.
For owners, that may become one of the most consequential lessons.
A sports district can extend the economic value of a stadium far beyond event day. But extending the digital experience with it requires deliberate decisions about infrastructure, operating responsibility and funding.
The stadium as technology anchor
Chau ultimately sees the shift toward mixed-use development as more than another cycle in venue construction.
The stadium is becoming an anchor in two ways.
Economically, it can generate the traffic and activity that support a broader real estate platform.
Technologically, it can provide the starting point for connectivity that has to continue through the surrounding district.
The systems themselves may differ. A residence does not need the same cellular architecture as a stadium bowl. A hotel may have a different operator and business model. Retail, parking and public plazas may require different combinations of cellular and Wi-Fi.
The objective is not necessarily one physical network.
It is continuity.
The fan should be able to park, pay, communicate, navigate, shop, dine and engage without knowing where one network ends and another begins.
Chau emphasizes this point: technology that anchors the stadium increasingly needs to extend into the mixed-use district, creating a seamless experience before, during and after the event. The financial evidence, in his view, suggests that the sports district itself is moving from trend to long-term development model.
