UFC 333: Volkanovski vs. Evloev: WiFi 7, a 10G Fiber Backbone and Wider Media Coverage

UFC 333: Volkanovski vs. Evloev was held at Etihad Arena on Yas Island, Abu Dhabi, on 24 October 2026. It was the 21st UFC event IP Care has delivered in the UAE since the first Fight Island card in July 2020, and the second UFC night of the 2026 season at the arena.

The brief from the venue was specific: take the arena network that carried the July 2026 fight night and extend it into additional media support areas. It was an extension, not a redesign. The architecture was already proven on this venue, so the work was in reaching more places without weakening the separation between networks that a pay-per-view broadcast depends on.

The scope

Four independent networks. The Media Center and Octagon, Edit, Broadcast (including broadcast team telephony) and TX each ran on their own segmented network behind a dedicated FortiGate firewall with load balancing. A fault or a heavy load on one network could not spill into another, which is how the production side of a UFC card is expected to run.

WiFi 7 on 10G fiber uplinks. The wireless layer used UniFi WiFi 7 access points, the same generation introduced at the arena for the July 2026 card, managed centrally from redundant wireless controllers. Access points and edge switches connected back to fiber core switching over 10G fiber uplinks, so the wired side kept pace with WiFi 7 client throughput in the busiest areas instead of becoming the bottleneck.

Extended media coverage. Additional edge switches, access points and single-mode fiber backbone carried the same network design into the extra media support areas requested for this card. New fiber runs were pulled, terminated and spliced on site, then tested and certified before the build was signed off.

Why an extension is a different job from a new build

Extending a live architecture is mostly a discipline problem. Every new area has to be surveyed, every new uplink has to land on the right network, and every new access point has to inherit the right security policy. The risk is not in any one device. It is in a switch port or an SSID that quietly ends up on the wrong segment.

The team that built the July 2026 network built this one, working from the same configurations and runbooks. Segmentation was checked network by network, wireless coverage was verified in the existing and the new areas, and each of the four networks was signed off independently before fight week.

Fight night

On 24 October the arena filled for a card headlined by Alexander Volkanovski against Movsar Evloev, and the networks went to air under the same event-day model used on every UFC night at Etihad Arena since 2020: a dedicated on-site monitoring team, spares held on site and a short escalation path into the venue technical team.

What carries forward

UFC 333 is the first card on which the WiFi 7 and 10G design was extended beyond its original footprint. Everything learned in the new media areas, from access point placement to fiber routing and cable dressing, goes into the runbook for the next UFC night at Etihad Arena.