While Fulham Football Club fans converge on the northern German city of Hamburg for what is arguably the biggest game in the club's history, back at the team's home ground of Craven Cottage in London its network supplier Juniper Networks has completed its new Local Area Network (LAN) infrastructure deployment based on EX3200 and EX4200 Series Ethernet Switches.

The club, owned by Mohammed al Fayed, the high profile retailer who just last week sold Knightsbridge based department store Harrods, invested in the new network to cope with 'growth in demand for LAN bandwidth from the ticket turnstiles, television networks and media commentators'.

Fulham celebrate a goal which helped take them to the Europa League Cup Final

It needed to improve the capacity and resiliency of the network to ensure efficient operation on match days but also to prioritise video and data traffic crossing the LAN in order to provide a high-quality service for visiting media companies, the club said.

"Our network infrastructure was no longer able to deal with the peaks of traffic we see on home match days," said Nicholas Pendlebury, IT Manager, Fulham FC.

"It used to take us over two hours to produce a video replay of the match for player analysis; it now takes just 15 minutes.

Juniper's EX Series Ethernet Switches provide us with an easy-to manage network foundation.

Secure and reliable, our network is now capable of managing high demand peak traffic, such as video, without interruption."

At the ground all turnstiles have now been equipped with IP terminals to monitor home and away fan attendance numbers and provide better crowd control over entrance into the stadium.

The new network will also support future requirements for VoIP and wireless connectivity which will be added at later stages of the network development to support remote, mobile ticketing devices for entrance to the ground and help meet new regulatory demands of the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

The switches are based on Juniper's Junos Software and the EX4200 Series Ethernet Switches feature Virtual Chassis technology designed to enable up to 10 EX4200 switches to interconnect and operate as a single system, lowering the amount of managed devices in a network and reducing capital and operating expenses.

"Many organisations understand the benefits of a single network operating system which reduces complexity in the network and supports open standards," said Gert-Jan Schenk, senior vice president, EMEA, Juniper Networks.

"By running Junos Software across its LAN infrastructure, Fulham FC has a low latency, consistent and reliable network which can manage different traffic demands and scale as required meeting its developing business needs."

Juniper's local partner on the Fulham FC deployment was Scalable Communications, a leading independent provider of secure, best of breed converged solutions.

Earlier this week the club's manager Roy Hodgson was named manager of the year at the English League Manager's Association annual dinner.