A Sold-Out Stadium, Powered by Sonic
Written by The Sonic Team
June 24, 2026 | 3 min read
Most baseball fans don’t think about what it takes to run a modern ballpark. They scan their ticket, grab a snack, and find their seat.
Behind that experience is a web of connected systems: ticketing, payments, broadcasting, and operations. All of it depends on reliable, high-speed internet to function.
On Opening Night at Raimondi Park, with 4,200 fans in the stands and the Oakland Ballers’ 2026 season officially underway, every one of those systems ran on Sonic Fiber Internet.
By the Numbers
| 4,200 Fans | In attendance at sold-out Raimondi Park |
| 70 Gigabytes of Data | Uploaded over the course of the night |
| 35 Gigabytes of Data | Downloaded over the course of the night |
| 36 Hours of Video | Equivalent hours uploaded during a single game |
| 160 Stadium Devices | Requiring reliable and simultaneous connectivity |
A Cashless Stadium
Raimondi Park runs entirely on cashless transactions. Every hot dog, every beer, every piece of merchandise sold is processed digitally. Simple in concept, but the operational reality is more demanding than it sounds.
On a sold-out Opening Night with 4,200 fans moving through the gates and hitting the concession stands, that’s hundreds of ticket scanners and payment terminals running simultaneously.
There’s no fallback. If the network slows down, the line slows down. Each entry gate, vendor stand, and point-of-sale terminal depends on a connection that stays consistent even when demand spikes.
That kind of reliability requires more than headline speeds. It needs low latency and steady throughput. Sonic’s fiber delivered both.
Powering the Broadcast
Covering a live baseball game is a production-intensive operation. A standard broadcast runs multiple cameras covering home plate, the pitcher, baselines, and the outfield, each generating a continuous stream of footage. That footage needs to move quickly and reliably from the field to editors, broadcasters, and social media teams uploading clips in real time.
On Opening Night, the Ballers’ broadcast team pushed 70 gigabytes of data upstream — the equivalent of 36 hours of video. That’s not just a live stream. It’s highlights, clips, and archive footage all moving at once, continuously, over the course of the game.
That volume of outbound data is where asymmetrical connections can break down. Most internet services prioritize download speed, leaving upload bandwidth as an afterthought. For a broadcast team on deadline, that’s a real problem.
Sonic’s fiber delivers symmetrical speeds, meaning uploads are just as fast as downloads. Footage moves when it needs to, without competing with everything else running on the network.
The Game, Streaming to Your Home
For the first time ever, the Ballers are streaming all Friday home games on YouTube — and Sonic powers every minute of it. No subscription. No paywall. Just Oakland baseball, available to Bay Area fans who can’t make the game.
The same network handling 160 devices, 70 gigabytes of uploads, and a full broadcast operation on Opening Night is what delivers the stream to your screen. If it can handle a sold-out ballpark, your living room is no problem.
Catch every Friday night home game live on the Oakland Ballers YouTube channel.
Built for This
Sonic has been engineering, building, and installing its own fiber-optic network in the Bay Area for more than 30 years. Not leasing infrastructure. Not patching together someone else’s network. Building it from the ground up, which means knowing exactly what it can handle.
A sold-out ballpark with 160 connected devices, 70 gigabytes of outbound data, a live broadcast, and hundreds of cashless transactions running simultaneously is exactly the kind of environment fiber was built for. Opening Night at Raimondi Park was a pretty good test.
