Business View Magazine | June 2022

199 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 9, ISSUE 6 COMMONWEALTH STADIUM “The City of Edmonton owns and operates Commonwealth Stadium; it’s a very important part of our community because it’s both an economic driver and sports tourism hub,” shares Jason Fesyk, Supervisor Stadium Major Events. “It’s a place where fans from all over gather to celebrate sports and entertainment. Since we’re less than 10 minutes away from the downtown core, we can attract events for Edmonton, Alberta, and Western Canada as a whole. We want to continue that over the next 20 years. We are now imagining what Commonwealth Stadium could look like in the future.” Two years ago, they began working on a Master Plan, despite the stadium looking “cosmetically well” for its 40 plus years. “This project will be more transformative because the arena is iconic and still useful in its current form,” Fesyk explains. “We’ll update our mechanical, electrical, audio-visual, hospitality areas, etc. to better align with the other Canadian stadiums built within the last five years.” One such update has been increasing the stadium’s overall Wi-Fi capabilities. Working with Telus Communications, the stadium is in the process of installing a 5G network that will better support the myriad of available team- and league-related apps. As Fesyk reports, “it’s been a very important piece to focus on. We’ve done a lot of work expanding our fiber optic networks inside the stadium. Since being built in 1978, many of these modern technologies have passed us by, so we’ve retrofitted the best we can.” Commonwealth Stadium maintains its competitive edge in today’s technology-based world by easily sustaining audiences of 65,000 who are simultaneously updating their social media accounts on assorted mobile devices. Other modern improvements are green oriented, such as switching over lighting to the more energy efficient LEDs. The stadium has also adopted Edmonton’s three-stream waste sorting program, mirroring how waste is separated into