Evinact Partner Jon O’Brien explains why securing Brisbane 2032’s digital legacy requires coordination across an entire region, and why the window to get it right is closing faster than most people realise.
When Matt Pasco was planning Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas, he made a decision that seemed unnecessary at the time and obvious in hindsight.
Before a single drop of concrete was poured, he insisted on running conduit – the physical tubing through which cables and fibre are later threaded – throughout the entire structure. Every corridor, every wall, every floor. Because he knew that once the concrete set, creating those pathways later would cost a fortune.
That forward planning is what allowed the $1.9 billion, 65,000-seat venue to later host the Super Bowl, the Country Music Awards, and major boxing and concert events, each with entirely different technology demands.
“Connectivity in the 2020s is like running water,” Pasco recently told an audience at QUT’s Future of Sport Summit. “It needs to be everywhere. It’s just got to work.”
It’s a simple principle, and one that the venues being built for Brisbane 2032 will surely apply. The venues will be connected; the builders will make sure of that.
Connectivity inside each stadium is the straightforward part. But holding it together across an entire region, and establishing who is responsible for doing so, is a different challenge entirely.
A different kind of Games
Brisbane 2032 will be the most distributed Games in Olympic history. Seventeen new and upgraded venues spanning nine locations across Queensland. Athletes’ villages in Brisbane, the Gold Coast and the Sunshine Coast. Events in Cairns, Rockhampton and Toowoomba. Training camps that will begin arriving months before the opening ceremony, long before the spotlight falls on the region.
Running alongside the venues is one of the most significant transport infrastructure programs in Queensland’s history, with new rail lines, highway upgrades, bus networks and transport coordination systems being rebuilt from the ground up. Taken together, it will all add up to the largest infrastructure investment in Queensland’s history.
Digital infrastructure is the connective tissue running through all of it.
The distributed model creates an extraordinary legacy opportunity; a chance to lift digital capability not just in Brisbane’s inner city but across the entire SEQ and regional areas. But it also creates a coordination challenge that a centralised Games simply doesn’t face. The more spread out the Games, the more the digital layer matters, and the harder it is to keep coherent.
Follow the experience, not the project boundary
Before thinking about systems and projects, it’s worth thinking about people. The right way to design digital infrastructure for Brisbane 2032 is to start with the individuals moving through the Games environment and work backwards to what they actually need.
Consider the athlete, training at a facility in Moreton Bay before moving to the Athletes’ Village in Brisbane ahead of their event. From their perspective, this should be a single unbroken digital environment, with accreditation that works everywhere, connectivity that doesn’t drop out, and information that follows them rather than requiring them to navigate a different system at every site.
Think about the international visitor attending events across multiple venues over several days. They need wayfinding, ticketing, accessibility services and connectivity that function coherently whether they’re at the Queensland Tennis Centre in Tennyson or the Hockey Centre on the Gold Coast. The moment the digital experience breaks down is the moment Brisbane loses them.
Or the person with a disability, navigating a Games that spans an entire state. The digital layer can provide consistent, location-aware accessibility information in the palm of their hand, regardless of where in Queensland they are. But only if the underlying data and standards are coordinated across every council, every venue and every region.
None of these experiences respect project boundaries. And designing digital infrastructure project by project, each to its own scope and standard, guarantees that the experience fragments exactly where those boundaries are.
Three layers, one experience
To understand both the opportunity and the risk, it helps to think about Brisbane 2032’s digital challenge in three layers: venue, precinct and region.
At the venue layer, the picture is relatively clear. Within each build contract, the basics will be covered. Think networking, fibre, communications infrastructure, accessibility technology, surveillance systems. But even here, things fall outside that scope: public safety communications, mobile coverage, and ensuring ICT infrastructure is consistent with the other 16 venues. That standardisation question currently has no named owner.
Step outside the stadium gate, and the directly adjacent precinct needs seamless connectivity as visitors move between venue and public space, real-time crowd monitoring, accessibility technology and public safety communications. Some elements may fall to Brisbane City Council, some to state agencies, some to telcos, but who is coordinating the standards and ensuring the infrastructure serves the community long after the Games?
Brenda Suh, who also spoke at the Future of Sport Summit, has lived this challenge. As Director of Business Technology at SoFi Stadium and Hollywood Park in Los Angeles, she manages a 300-acre mixed-use precinct built around one of the world’s most advanced stadiums; a direct parallel to what Victoria Park will need to become. “If you can get it right the first time,” she said, “it’s a million times cheaper than going back.”
Scale out to the regional layer and the challenge becomes more acute still. A distributed Games spanning SEQ and regions needs a shared view of what is required from the digital infrastructure layer that simply doesn’t exist at that scale today, when considering areas like public safety communications, mobile coverage from Brisbane to Cairns and across the distributed venues and precincts, and the operational capability to manage venues, people movement and security across an entire region simultaneously.
What good looks like
What Brisbane 2032 needs is a coordinating function with a clear mandate to hold the digital thread across the entire program. Not to own delivery (the delivery partners, builders and asset owners will do that), but to ensure coherence.
That means shared standards and blueprints, a clear picture of what SEQ and the regions digital capability should look like in 2033, and active engagement across Unite 32, GIICA, the organising committee, councils, telcos and state agencies, so that the digital layer is coordinated rather than merely co-located.
The stadiums and rail lines will be visible to the naked eye long after the flame goes out. The digital layer will not. But in many ways it’s the more consequential investment; the difference between a region that emerges from 2032 with a genuinely uplifted digital baseline and one that emerges with 17 excellent stadiums and the same connectivity gaps that existed before.
What Pasco and Suh learned building venues and precincts, Brisbane 2032 needs to apply across an entire region. Get the right people in the room early, agree on standards at the outset, and design for the life of the asset rather than the event.
A distributed Games, done with deliberate digital coordination, is an opportunity to raise the floor across the entire SEQ region. Not just inside venues, not just in the inner city, but across the transport corridors, the regional communities and the operational systems that people will rely on every day, long after the last medal has been awarded.
The window to get this right is still open. But across Brisbane and the region, the concrete is beginning to set.
