Shownotes
When your infrastructure can’t expand any further, you don’t just add hardware—you rethink everything.
Chris Crist, Chief Information Officer at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, joins Go Beyond the Connection to explain how a wireless-first strategy became the foundation for nonstop operations at the world’s busiest airport.
With over 108 million passengers annually and a complex campus that rivals a small city, ATL needed a network capable of more than just keeping up. Chris shares how they hit a hard limit on physical cabling—and turned it into a catalyst for innovation.
Key learnings from this episode:
- Why traditional cabling reached its breaking point—and what came next
- How distributed antenna systems (DAS) and upgraded Wi-Fi support 24,000+ concurrent users
- What biometric boarding and AI-powered security mean for real-time operations
- The role of CIOs in business alignment and infrastructure resiliency
- How to build hot-standby data centers and redundant distribution frames into the network fabric
“We have to become more efficient with what we have. It’s through technology that we’re going to make that work—and we’ll need to rely more on wireless capabilities to do that.” – Chris Crist
This episode is packed with actionable insights for IT leaders managing complex operations, constrained environments, or growing digital footprints. Whether you’re in aviation, healthcare, retail, or manufacturing, Chris’s wireless-first roadmap offers practical takeaways for building resilient, scalable infrastructure.
📬 Subscribe to the LinkedIn newsletter
Transcripts
Chris Crist Podcast Transcript
[:[00:00:32] Steve MacDonald: I think you live it every day. And so we're gonna dig deep into that in a big way, and especially in what shouldn't be surprising to people these days. But we're gonna talk about wireless-first infrastructure, and not only why that's important for resiliency, but why it's a business driver.
[:[00:01:12] Steve MacDonald: So I just want to make that clear. But here's what I'd love to do. You have a phenomenal story from your childhood to where you've achieved the status of where you are today. I'd love to hear a lot more about your background before we dive in.
[:[00:01:43] Chris Crist: And so— and again, I look forward to talking about the details as to why it's not boring. But yeah, I do appreciate the opportunity to talk a little bit about my background. Part of the reason why that's important to me is because I really hope that if I can share this information, some individuals out there that may find themselves in similar circumstances will know— hey, you can accomplish these things.
[:[00:02:37] Chris Crist: And so she never learned how to read or write or drive a vehicle. And so she took the bus to make it happen. She figured it out. And she raised six kids—my uncles, aunts, and my mother. She had hoped for the best for them, but they didn’t get through high school themselves—a lot of them didn’t even make it to high school.
[:[00:03:11] Chris Crist: I never considered myself good enough to wear a suit, even. I know that sounds silly, but suits were for the big leagues—people that were far beyond my reach growing up. So when I joined the military out of high school, I joined the Air Force as a combat medic. It really opened my eyes to a whole other world.
[:[00:03:46] Chris Crist: So again, I could talk about all my experience from there, but I just wanted to bring that up for folks. Sometimes it just takes exposure to the right environment, and it gets you going.
[:[00:04:16] Chris Crist: So as the busiest airport in the world, in 2024, we had 108 million passengers go through this facility. Roughly 300,000 passengers go through this facility every single day. We have 63,000 employees that work at this organization. It is a city. And when you think about 300,000 people going through one location in one day— again, how big of a city is that?
[:[00:05:05] Chris Crist: And so, we gotta keep it running 24/7. This is an operation that never stops. And so yeah, we have an immense opportunity to ensure that the passenger experience is safe and efficient. And through technology, we’re excited about where it’s going— even more efficient than what it is.
[:[00:05:50] Steve MacDonald: I know you told a story about how you don’t take a job unless you feel that the CIO position is a seat at the table, and you have direct involvement in the strategic direction— and therefore, the long-term sustainable growth of the business. Tell us a little bit about that, and then tell us about how you feel connected to the business and driving the business.
[:[00:06:34] Chris Crist: I've been fortunate to have the experience as CIO of a few different organizations in different industries, and after all that experience, I would say that there's a difference between organizations that choose to have their department a couple layers down from the CEO and those that have that IT department either directly reporting to the CEO or very closely. And in my opinion, it's an organization that views technology as more of a strategic partner versus one that views it as, "Alright, it's a tactical initiative." And so that's how I view that. But it is very important to me, and I will say at our organization, we have an incredible leader, and we report to that leader.
[:[00:07:37] Chris Crist: ...hand in it. He doesn't want to have it filtered through multiple [people]; he wants to hear more firsthand from me because he knows how important it is. Of course, I could talk about all the details of why that matters and how we got to where we are, but generally speaking, that's where my thought process goes with that.
[:[00:08:07] Steve MacDonald: And so, what's an example? What's one of the things that you think about every single day when you think about that passenger experience and how you're helping to support that?
[:[00:08:38] Chris Crist: And so, of course, some people may recall that experience from before 2001, and so we can't get back there. A big part of the reason why is through what we call computer vision, but essentially it's using artificial intelligence to recognize objects in space via cameras. So I'll give you a very basic example of how we're starting with that process.
[:[00:09:28] Chris Crist: For an organization that sees 300,000 passengers per day, seconds make a big difference. And so, we saw immense efficiency in that. We're getting ready this year to make it to where all of our international gates have that capability. So—and that's just the beginning—eventually we're gonna continue to expand upon that capability so that you never have to stop anywhere. So that's the goal.
[:[00:10:17] Steve MacDonald: But there's sensors—we talked a lot about the Internet of Things. Like, in one respect, somebody could naively think: you're in one location, you're in a major metropolitan market, you could have hardwired connections to everything and anything that you want—why would you have to go wireless?
[:[00:10:48] Chris Crist: I want to channel Ms. Jan Lennon. She was our interim general manager for a while. I say general manager—that's the actual title that's used—but essentially CEO. So Jan would continue to say that we're landlocked. We cannot expand anymore physically. We can only build so much. So we don't have the same luxury as, for example, Denver Airport.
[:[00:11:33] Chris Crist: We literally could not run any more physical cabling into the data center. I've never heard that ever happen. And so, we had to physically construct and expand the data center on both sides to make it to where we could fit more capacity into it. We know we can't continue to operate that way, so we have to rely on more wireless capability.
[:[00:12:20] Chris Crist: So of course, as you can imagine, there's more than just cell phones that will connect through cellular capability—not just passenger phones, but plenty of devices. Then, of course, on the Wi-Fi side of the house with the Ethernet, we're definitely investing quite a bit in improving our wireless access point capability, as well as the infrastructure that’s required to make this all tick. So I'll stop there—I know that was a lot going on.
[:[00:12:59] Chris Crist: Yeah, absolutely. And so I'll give you a few examples—maybe just two. One example is we were looking for this capability that would allow us to be able to detect airborne pathogens in our ventilation systems, or if it's just simply in the air within our buildings. But in order to do that, we have to install more IoT capability, and more specifically, we have to install sensors within our HVAC system. Those require connection to our Wi-Fi capability. So we're talking more IP addresses, we're talking much more—and that could potentially be hundreds and hundreds of devices just for that project if we were to do it across our organization.
[:[00:13:59] Chris Crist: So, again, more things that require connection wirelessly. We're looking at expanding our capability or wireless requirements—gosh, by thousands. Just in the next two years, it's going to be an increase by thousands. So we've got to be ready for that. It's not practical to have a physical wire connected to every one of these things. It's just—it's not practical.
[:[00:14:45] Chris Crist: Yeah. I'm not going to—I won't call out the carrier specifically. We have a lot of airlines here that we partner with, and we have a great relationship with all of them. But we didn't realize—and it's just a fact of the matter—we didn't realize how much they actually relied on our network infrastructure. Sometimes you don't fully know that until something goes wrong, and we had an incident just last week, actually, where there were some wireless access points—about 17 of them. There was an incident that happened and affected those 17, and we figured, okay, we're going to have issues with passenger connectivity, of course.
[:[00:15:35] Chris Crist: We actually didn't realize how reliant they were. We figured they were using it, but we didn't realize that they had pivoted towards using it almost primarily to do their business. So again, it's great. We think it's great. We certainly want for folks to be able to utilize the infrastructure that's there. But my gosh, it is a reminder of how much we're going in that direction—how more people are just saying, hey, you know what? Let's just connect to the wireless capability and run.
[:What is the "in"? And resiliency is not something that you've given up on or you are compromising at all. So just—for those that are still thinking about the hardwired world and how that is the way that we need to stay tethered in connection to the hardwired world as much as we possibly can—
[:[00:17:01] Chris Crist: I think it's about adjusting the mindset as to where you stop the wire. Because our wireless infrastructure, for example, it's certainly relying on hardware. It relies on your switches and routers, core switches—and you definitely need the hardware. And those are, of course, connected physically through wires. But from there, as you get your wireless access points in place, we can see—we can connect in certain areas—up to 24,000 simultaneous connections wirelessly for our passengers alone. And we want that. We want that in place. And so then, our employees—they certainly accomplish a lot of their work wirelessly.
[:[00:18:01] Chris Crist: For them, that's just not going to cut it. They need live information—constantly back and forth. So there are a lot of reasons why—for an organization like ours, anyways, and in my opinion, many organizations out there—it just, it will slow you down if you want to continue to rely on that only wire connection to your end users.
[:[00:18:46] Steve MacDonald: It reminded me of another conversation I had when you were talking about the expectations. Two things. One, I just got off a call a couple of hours ago with a Chief Marketing Officer who said, "I actually switched from one carrier to the next because their promise of in-flight wireless didn't deliver."
[:[00:19:26] Steve MacDonald: And it's just—so he said to think about it—I said, "We've actually—we're all living it. It's not, should we adopt it? We're here." And to your point, it's about how do we invest more? How do we lean in heavier on this? And I know that you're still operating in an environment where you don't have unlimited resources, and so where you make and place your strategic bets is really important.
[:[00:20:25] Steve MacDonald: So, when you are placing your bets and you're going wireless-first, what is your advice for other CIOs that are listening in to this today?
[:[00:21:04] Chris Crist: To your point, where that individual switched carriers because they were halfway connected—it's going to be more and more of a demand of customers. How do we ensure that they're going to be connected?
[:[00:21:35] Chris Crist: In our organization, we are moving forward with a project that allows us to be more resilient because we think—it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. In 2024, there was an incident that happened to a major airport—a ransomware attack—they were down.
[:[00:22:17] Chris Crist: Then there are Intermediate Distribution Frames that are throughout the concourse. You can think of these things as the brain or the nervous system for our IT infrastructure. If something happens to the MDF, the concourse—the full concourse—is going to be affected.
[:[00:22:55] Chris Crist: To be redundant when it comes to our data center, even. And we're just going to keep on going, Steve. We're not going to stop there. We're going to keep asking: what's next, what's next? So that we can keep going 24/7 and have uptime that is acceptable to us. And even if we're under attack, or even if there's a power outage, or even if there's an issue—we can keep going.
[:[00:23:23] Steve MacDonald: That reminded me—when you mentioned the hot connection—that's the failover, that's the redundancy, that's the "we won't skip a beat." We've got two hot connections and we're constantly load-balancing and looking and deciding what's going on and where we should be. AI should be helping us place our bets, right? On where the best connection is and where the most throughput is in all of that.
[:[00:24:03] Chris Crist: Hmm. We could go a lot of different routes on this, but I will stay with our organization. And it is really exciting, 'cause you know what I've learned since I've been here? It's that this airport, with as many people that come here from around the world, it can oftentimes be the first experience that someone has coming into the United States.
[:[00:25:00] Chris Crist: I do want to provide an example of something that we're looking at right now that I think will excite a lot of people. I think that they'll understand this.
[:[00:25:27] Chris Crist: So we might as well take advantage of the infrastructure that we have. So if we put an AI overlay—we're getting ready to partner with this organization to do proof of concept—but it's really exciting because right now, for example, if someone comes to the facility, they do something wrong—okay, let's say that they leave a bag unattended—and so now we're concerned that it could be bad news.
[:[00:26:00] Chris Crist: Today, they get that information over to our security professionals, but man, they gotta sift through those thousands of cameras. Okay, where were they at?
[:[00:26:29] Chris Crist: It will immediately, within seconds, tell you exactly where they went. And that is exciting, because it's gonna improve the security and safety of our passengers in a dramatic way. I just wanted to point that out. It paints a picture of where we're going. Because you can imagine everything else that we can do with a capability like that. So Steve, I talked about that quite a bit. To me, it's really exciting and I think it's gonna transform the way we do aviation.
[:[00:27:00] Steve MacDonald: can to keep us safe in that environment. But to be relentless in, "What can we do better?"—and there's always something we can do better—that is part of that customer experience, which is the bottom line, which you brought up at the beginning.
[:[00:27:38] Chris Crist: Wow. I have to choose one thing? If there are individuals out there that are—I want to stick with—in order to make something like this happen, in order to move forward with these changes, perhaps Steve, hopefully it's not a new thing I'm introducing, but I just want for folks to understand out there that no matter what role you're in, if you're a leader or if you're an individual
[:[00:28:10] Chris Crist: Maybe if you're in healthcare, you want better patient care—whatever it may be—if you really want to make that change, it's, in my opinion, to be successful, you have to first be your best to understand the business that you want to impact. So if I'm going to introduce a new—if I'm, hey, I have a new technology that I believe is gonna improve the lives of our operations employees, let's just say—it's not a smart idea to just go to 'em and say, "Hey, we're gonna do this."
[:[00:28:55] Chris Crist: "What are your thoughts? What do you think about the solution? Do you think it could work?" You get them involved with the whole thing from the get-go. Then you go together with that. It may sound simple to some, but it can be a challenge. But I do believe that if you're gonna make meaningful impact on your organization, it's very important to try to understand the business that you're trying to impact.
[:[00:29:17] Steve MacDonald: I mean, here's what I took away from that. In businesses in general, we have to understand our customers in order to better serve them. And you have passengers, but you have internal customers—
[:[00:29:29] Steve MacDonald: —you are serving. That is an equally important audience, because how they deliver the experience of being a passenger—and they're a very important part of that.
[:[00:29:50] Chris Crist: A hundred percent.
[:[00:30:00] Steve MacDonald: LinkedIn profile and gave people an opportunity to reach out and ask questions?
[:[00:30:07] Steve MacDonald: Thank you Chris. The mission of this podcast is to bring really important voices and perspectives and insights from the experiences we have in all different trades and industries and different levels within the organization. And if we share that, then like the saying—that’s the rising tide that lifts all boats.
[:[00:30:34] Chris Crist: Thank you Steve, and I want to just mention, tying things back to the beginning—I am grateful for the conversation and for you to have the words that you have for me. I really appreciate that. If I was a 15-year-old looking into the future, and I could see that I was having this conversation with you and getting the good word out—I wouldn't believe it.
[:[00:31:00] Chris Crist: and just for the opportunity to talk through some really exciting things. I really appreciate that.
