The Hidden IT Costs of Running a 6-Court Padel Venue

When padel operators plan their venue build, the budget typically covers the obvious: courts, surfaces, lighting, lease, fit-out, and branding. IT infrastructure rarely gets more than a line item — if it appears at all.

Then reality hits. The WiFi doesn’t cover the outdoor courts. The booking system can’t trigger the door locks. The CCTV keeps dropping frames because the cameras share bandwidth with guest WiFi. The payment terminal fails a PCI audit.

Here’s what IT actually costs for a well-designed 6-court padel venue, and what happens when you cut corners.

The Core Infrastructure

Internet Connectivity: £300-600/month

Business fibre isn’t the same as home broadband. You need:

A dedicated business line with guaranteed bandwidth (not contended residential)
Symmetric speeds (upload matters for CCTV, AI cameras, and cloud services)
A static IP address for remote management
Ideally, a backup connection for failover

A single business fibre line typically runs £300-400/month. Add a backup connection and you’re at £500-600/month. Skip the backup and your courts don’t open when the primary connection goes down — because your cloud-based booking and access control stop working.

Network Hardware: £2,000-4,000 (one-off)

This covers:

Enterprise gateway/firewall — handles routing, VPN, intrusion detection, and VLAN configuration
Managed switches — connect everything on the wired side (cameras, access points, POS terminals)
Enterprise access points — 3-4 units for full indoor coverage, more if you have outdoor courts
Structured cabling — Cat6 runs from the network cabinet to every AP, camera, and POS location

The common mistake: buying consumer-grade kit to save £1,000 upfront, then spending £3,000 replacing it six months later when it can’t handle the load.

WiFi: Included in hardware above, but worth calling out

Guest WiFi isn’t optional — members expect it. But it needs to be properly segmented from your business systems. A captive portal for guest access, bandwidth limits per device, and VLAN separation from staff and payment networks are the minimum.

Skipping VLAN segmentation doesn’t save money. It creates a PCI compliance gap that could cost you far more.

Court Automation

Access Control: £1,500-3,000 (one-off)

Automated door access linked to your booking system enables reduced-staffing or unmanned operation. Each court entry point needs:

Electronic lock or strike mechanism
Controller that communicates with the booking platform
Backup access method (key override)

At £250-500 per door depending on hardware choice, a 6-court venue costs £1,500-3,000 for the access control hardware.

The payback is fast. If unmanned operation saves you one staff member during off-peak hours (say, 6am-9am and 9pm-midnight), that’s 6 hours/day at £12-15/hour = £72-90/day = £2,100-2,700/month in saved labour. The hardware pays for itself in the first month.

Lighting Automation: £500-1,500 (one-off)

Smart lighting controllers that schedule court lights based on bookings. The hardware cost is modest; the energy savings are significant.

A court lit when nobody is playing costs roughly £2-4/hour in electricity. If you’re running 6 courts for 16 hours/day and average 60% utilisation, that’s 38.4 unbooked court-hours per day. At £3/hour, that’s £115/day wasted — £3,450/month.

Automated lighting tied to bookings eliminates most of this waste. Even at 80% efficiency, you’re saving £2,700+/month.

Security and Compliance

CCTV: £2,000-5,000 (one-off)

A 6-court venue typically needs 8-12 cameras covering courts, reception, entrance, and back-of-house areas.

Cost breakdown:

Cameras: £150-400 each depending on quality and features
NVR (network video recorder) or cloud storage subscription
Installation and cabling

On-premise NVR: Lower ongoing cost but you manage the hardware. Annual cost after installation is primarily storage drives (replace every 3-5 years).

Cloud-managed cameras: Higher monthly cost but zero maintenance. Subscriptions typically run £8-15/camera/month.

Storage consideration: Retaining 30 days of footage from 10 cameras generates substantial data. Budget accordingly — whether that’s NVR disk capacity or cloud storage tier.

PCI DSS 4.0 Compliance: £500-1,500/year

If you process card payments (and you will), PCI DSS 4.0 compliance is mandatory since March 2025. Costs include:

Annual Self-Assessment Questionnaire completion
Quarterly network vulnerability scans by an approved scanning vendor (ASV)
Any remediation work identified by scans

Most venues qualify as Level 4 merchants. The annual compliance cost is manageable, but ignoring it creates real risk — both regulatory and financial.

You’re collecting member data, booking records, CCTV footage, and potentially children’s data. You need privacy policies, retention schedules, CCTV signage, and processes for data subject requests. The cost is mainly time and documentation, but it’s not optional.

Optional Revenue Drivers

AI Camera Systems: £5,000-15,000 (one-off) + £200-500/month

AI-powered match recording and analytics are becoming a serious revenue driver for padel venues. The upfront cost includes cameras, processing hardware, and installation. Ongoing costs cover cloud processing and software subscriptions.

Revenue model: Courts with AI video typically charge a premium per booking. At high utilisation, the additional revenue per court per month makes the ROI compelling — often under 12 months to payback.

Infrastructure note: Each AI camera stream needs substantial bandwidth. If you’re adding these to an existing venue, you may need to upgrade your internet connection and network switches to handle the additional load.

Ongoing Monthly Costs

Here’s what the IT side of a 6-court venue typically costs per month:

Category	Monthly Cost	Notes
Internet (primary)	£300-400	Business fibre, symmetric
Internet (backup)	£150-200	Recommended for cloud-based access control
Cloud services	£50-100	Booking platform, email, backups
CCTV storage	£0-150	£0 with on-premise NVR; £80-150 for cloud-managed
AI camera subscription	£0-500	Optional; £200-500 if installed
Managed IT support	£250-500	Monitoring, maintenance, support
PCI compliance	£40-125	Annual cost divided by 12
Total	£790-1,975

At the lower end — business fibre with failover, on-premise CCTV recording, no AI cameras, and core managed support — you’re looking at around £790/month. Add cloud-managed CCTV and AI camera subscriptions and you’re closer to £2,000/month.

What Happens When You Cut Corners

We see the same patterns when venues try to save on IT:

Consumer WiFi router instead of enterprise access points: Works for the first month. Then you hit 50 members on a Saturday morning and the booking system stops responding on their phones.

No VLAN segmentation: Your payment terminals share a network with guest devices. One compromised phone and you’ve got a data breach on a system processing card payments.

No backup internet: Your ISP has an outage at 10am on Saturday. Your cloud-based access control can’t authenticate bookings. Courts don’t unlock. Members are angry. You lose a day’s revenue.

Skipping CCTV on courts: A member claims injury. Your insurance asks for footage. You don’t have it. Claim denied.

The venue that spends £5,000-8,000 on proper IT infrastructure and £500-1,000/month on managed support will run more smoothly, comply with regulations, and ultimately make more money than the one that tries to do it on £1,000 of consumer kit.

Planning Your Venue Build?

If you’re in the planning stages, the best time to get IT right is before you sign off the fit-out. We can provide a full venue IT specification tailored to your court count, automation requirements, and budget.

Get a free venue IT assessment — we’ll review your plans and give you an honest picture of what the technology will cost.