Celtic FC is a Scottish institution, regularly packing its 61,000 seat stadium to capacity. But because of its sheer size, staff moving around Celtic Park and further afield as part of their job had trouble staying in touch with email and other information databases, prompting the club to install a T-Mobile WiFi hotspot within the stadium.

This hosts about 20 BlackBerry smartphone users and 15 people using laptop PCs equipped with 3G data cards, including coaches, senior managers, and reporters writing for the club’s own newspaper, Celtic View.

WiFi access is also provided for guests in the stadium’s lounge and corporate facilities, using Cisco wireless access points backed up to a broadband connection.

Celtic FC IT analyst Phil Dalbeck says installing the hotspot was a big job because of the stadium’s structural composition, which includes lots of steel and concrete, and because it covers such a large area.

‘T-Mobile spent a good few days working out the best way to do this, outlined project plans, then sent some guys who really knew their stuff to do the installation,’ he says. ‘Six weeks later, it commissioned a separate, independent audit to do full on-site testing to make sure all the coverage, cabling and other equipment was up to scratch.’

As a corporate sponsor, Celtic FC has commercial ties with T-Mobile that earn it special rates on data tariffs. But Dalbeck says prices have come down significantly since the club first tested the 3G data cards last year, largely down to T-Mobile’s high-speed download packet access (HSDPA) upgrade.

Part of the deal involves T-Mobile’s integrated extension call facility, which helps reduce call spend between fixed-line desk phones and company mobiles by routing them over T-Mobile’s network rather than BT’s.

Dalbeck is assessing the possibility of using Outlook to push email onto other mobile devices as an alternative to BlackBerrys, as well as integrating support for HSDPA so users can have data, telephony and remote email services on one device.

‘We also plan to use the Cisco telephony rollout in conjunction with unified messaging, basically voicemail to email, because it is quite handy for some users to have a mobile device that can play messages back,’ he says.