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Dallas Cowboys, AT&T add more tech to AT&T Stadium, add fuel to ‘most-connected stadium’ debate

August 21, 2014 by 5 Comments

AT&T Stadium, North Texas, USA

AT&T Stadium, North Texas, USA

During last Sunday’s first “real” football game at Levi’s Stadium, I was asked several times if I thought the San Francisco 49ers’ new home was the “most connected” venue ever. I hesitated and hedged my answer a bit, because when it comes to wireless networks and tech innovations I think AT&T Stadium — home of the Dallas Cowboys — needs to be mentioned in the same sentence as Levi’s.

This week AT&T and the Cowboys announced more enhancements to AT&T Stadium’s already powerful network, and a new toy for fans to interact with. First on the network side, AT&T said from last summer until now it has increased the capacity of the stadium’s DAS by 50 percent, with 1,300 DAS antennas now in place. On the Wi-Fi side the stadium now has more than 1,500 access points, which may be the most in any stadium anywhere, to the best of my knowledge. (According to the Niners’ press guide, Levi’s has 1,200 Wi-Fi APs.) Throw in the big TV hanging from the center of the roof and AT&T Stadium has to be part of any discussion about “the most connected stadium” in football, if not in all of sport.

AT&T Stadium's new "Fan Experience Board" in louvering position. Credit all photos: AT&T/Dallas Cowboys.

AT&T Stadium’s new “Fan Experience Board” in louvering position. Credit all photos: AT&T/Dallas Cowboys.

(I’d also include AT&T Park in San Francisco in that argument, which has somewhere north of 1,200 Wi-Fi APs in a much smaller venue; from what we hear the two AT&T-sponsored stadiums have a friendly competition when it comes to tech deployments.)

On the new-toy side it should be fun to see the new 130-foot “AT&T Fan Experience Board” in action — according to AT&T and the Cowboys this contraption is built of 40 mirrored louvers which can rotate in sync, and can show ads, fan pictures and will also be part of what the team and AT&T are calling the “Unite this house” feature on a new fan app. We’ll let the Cowboys blog explain how this will work, on plays where Tony Romo is throwing to teammates instead of to opponents:

The “Unite the House” fan interaction feature on the app will alert fans at pivotal moments of the game through their mobile devices. As the stadium app vibrates, a message will be displayed providing the particular context and immediacy of the action. Fans will be guided to unlock their phones, hold their fingers on the Dallas Cowboys star and as more phones power up, the stadium will be full of strobes, not only from mobile devices, but also on the ribbon displays and the HD video board. The visual will gain intensity and speed as more fans join in, energizing the stadium and culminating in a final eruption of light and motion provided by the louvers that will canvas the entire stadium.

AT&T Stadium interactive screens

AT&T Stadium interactive screens

AT&T and the Cowboys also announced some large interactive screens — the Cowboys blog called them “life-sized iPhones” — where fans can swipe to learn more about Cowboys players, or Cowboys cheerleaders. Our guess is that both will be immensely popular. At Levi’s, there are some interactive displays and features — one, sponsored by Yahoo!, asks fans to answer trivia questions. While it’s neat to see these things emerge, I wonder if instead of fluffy features some interactive boards could be converted into things that could help you — like with stadium maps, or an app that would let a phone-less fan send a message to someone else’s device. Our guess is that you will see more, not less, of these interactive screens in the near future.

If nothing else, the Cowboys and AT&T seem to be showing that even off the field, the NFL is a competitive league — we will be interested to see how the technology deployments at other stadiums, like Jacksonville, play out. Look for more coverage and anlysis in our upcoming Q3 Stadium Tech Report issue, which will focus on… football. AT&T technology photos to follow.

AT&T Fan Experience board with single message

AT&T Fan Experience board with single message

Message board showing photo compilation

Message board showing photo compilation

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Cisco, Dallas Cowboys, DAS, iPhone, NFL, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

AT&T’s DAS and Wi-Fi network traffic for Final Four hits multiple Terabyte levels

April 14, 2014 by 1 Comment

AT&T StadiumWant to host a big sporting event? You better have a big network. Down in Texas, where everything’s big, AT&T had to go as large as possible to keep fans at the recent Final Four connected. According to AT&T, traffic on its cellular and Wi-Fi networks in and around AT&T Stadium surpassed terabyte levels during college basketball’s biggest weekend, with just over a TB of traffic on cellular and more than 4 TB on the stadium’s Wi-Fi network.

Granted, holding the final games of the college basketball season in a football stadium is sort of a guaranteed way to push the envelope when it comes to fan-phone traffic. With 79,444 fans at the semifinal games on April 5, this year’s event set a new record for most people at a college hoops game. Understandably, cell phone traffic also set records as according to AT&T its total data usage on cellular networks inside the stadium for all three games was 885 GB, up from 667 GB used at last year’s tourney in Atlanta and up from 376 GB used 2 years ago in New Orleans. When you throw in data usage at connected areas like the stadium parking lots, AT&T reported 1,268 GB of traffic, which is a massive amount of selfies.

And remember, this is JUST AT&T traffic. No telling how much T-Mobile, Sprint and Verizon customers generated. Anyone at those companies want to let us know, please do so and we’ll add it all up.

In its press releases before the game AT&T made some noise about how it was doing cool things to prepare for the tournament crowd, like putting “stealth” DAS antennas below the court. Any hoops/hockey stadium IT director knows what’s going on there; when you put a basketball court into a facility that has normally wider fields (football or hockey rinks) you have a huge problem bringing connectivity to the VIP courtside seats. Hence, the solution for the Final Four: antennas below the court. Something that will probably be copied in a lot of arenas around the country.

On the Wi-Fi side, AT&T has one of the bigger and better Wi-Fi networks inside its namesake stadium, and it was put to heavy use as well. According to AT&T its stadium Wi-Fi network carried 4,035 GB of traffic total for the three games. Is your network ready for that kind of pressure? How high will this usage surge go? Have we seen the top yet or are connected fans just getting started?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Basketball, Cisco, Dallas Cowboys, DAS, NCAA Hoops, NFL, Wi-Fi Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , ,

Friday Grab Bag: More Thursday Night Football? New land speed record set

October 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

In case you were dying to know which of the new iPhones from Apple is the top seller, wait no more. Computerworld, with an assist from Consumer Intelligence Research Partners has done the heavy lifting for you.

The results are really not that surprising, the high end iPhone 5S is outselling the much less expensive iPhone 5C by better than two to one. It said that 64% bought the 5S, 27% bought the 5C and the remaining 9% bought the older 4S.

Lack of viewers leading to more Thursday night games?
According to the Wall Street Journal the NFL is looking at adding additional games to its slate of Thursday night broadcasts, adding to the 13 games that are already broadcast on that day of the week by making some doubleheaders.

The WSJ said that the reason is that the league is disappointed in the ratings that its broadcasts bring in, which while high for that day of the week are lower than Sunday and Monday. The NFL is denying the rumor saying that it is false.

Of course it could not end there. So Jerry Jones, the Cowboys owner said that the league is indeed thinking about starting to play doubleheaders on Thursday, which the league again denied.


Jessi Combs sets land speed record
Time to reset the clock to count down when the latest land speed record will be broken, as Jessi Combs driving a converted F-104 Lockheed Starfighter, just broke the women’s land speed record, one that managed to last 48 years, according to Gizmag.

The old record was 308.51 miles per hour set by Lee Breedlove in 1965 on Utah’s Salt Lake Flats. Combs hit 392.954 mph running at Oregon’s Alvord Desert course. The vehicle had a mere 52,000 hp, without the afterburners going.

Will the latest version of Android and a new smartphone arrive this month?
There are hints that the next generation of the Android operating system, version 4.4 and a new Nexus smartphone, will be announced on Oct. 28, due to hints that have been found in a number of Google’s Twitter messages.

The rumor campaign is based around KitKat, the code name for the next version of the operating system, and yes it is based on the candy bar. According to the LA Times the tweets could contain cryptic clues that point to the rollout. Well we have two weeks to see if that is true.

Filed Under: Android, Apple, Apps, Athlete to Follow, Basketball, Bonneville Salt Flats, Dallas Cowboys, Google, iPhone, NBA, NFL Tagged With: , , , , ,

iPad now on Duke’s hard court

September 25, 2012 by 1 Comment

Duke University’s men’s basketball team is the latest college sports team to adopt a tablet as a major training tool as the school revealed this week that it was going to eliminate notebooks and move over to Apple’s iPad.

The school will be providing the latest version of the iPad with a 64GB storage capacity and players will have a range of information ranging from the static such as schedules and scouting reports, to live video of the teams’ plays as well as those of rivals and scouting reports. Also included will be tracking software and the ability to wipe the memory if they are stolen or lost.

Tablets are gaining ever increasing acceptance across a wide spectrum of usage models and sports, often viewed as so old school that it is still considering the typewriter, has actually been at the forefront of adoption.

There are at least eight NFL teams that have moved away from paper notebooks and onto iPads including the Dallas Cowboys, Washington Redskins and the Baltimore Ravens. MLB and the NBA have also been quick to follow suit.

Colleges have seen what their professional brethren are doing and have also started to adopt the technology. At the start of this season Stanford University adopted the iPad for its football players. Ohio State announced earlier this year that it was going to outfit all of its student athletes with iPads over the next two years. Other schools moving in this direction include Syracuse and the University of Colorado.

The one constant I am seeing is that almost all of the schools and pro teams are using Apple’s iPad as the tablet of choice and that is a great PR boost for the company (not that they really need it), but if rivals want to get high profile positioning of their tablets they might be well rewarded by going after some teams. I guess we might see this change a bit when the Windows 8 tablets come out next month, but then again maybe not.

Filed Under: Apple, Basketball, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Duke University, iOS, iPad, Major League Baseball, Microsoft, NBA Game Time, NCAA Football, NCAA Hoops, NFL, PlayerLync, Windows 8 Tagged With: , , ,

Denver Broncos the latest to jump onto iPad Playbook

April 24, 2012 by 1 Comment

The Denver Broncos have jettisoned its old time playbooks in favor of the bright new shiny iPad; 120 tablets in all which will feature Verizon Wireless 4G access and with most of the iPads top end models with 64GB, according to the Denver Post.

The team plans to load the iPads not only with the playbook but also with each weeks game plan, scouting reports on upcoming teams and video clips among other digital data. The system will be set up so that as new plays are developed they will be ‘pushed’ onto each tablet.

In the past the team had printed a 500 pound playbook each week of the season that contained much of the information, but the sheer mass made it very difficult to quickly locate different pieces of information.

The program was co designed by the Broncos and a developer named PlayerLync and among the program’s features is the ability to allow players and coaches to annotate and highlight plays as well as provide the team with playbook security by enabling it to erase the entire iPad remotely.

The team will provide the iPads to coaches, players, scouts and other team personnel. It should be noted that while the players and coaches can use the iPads for practice and training purposes the NFL does not allow electronic devices of this type to be on the field during games.

The league has relented somewhat in that in the past these notebooks and tablets had to be off in the locker room 90 minutes prior to kickoff, now that rule has been rescinded.

This is part of a growing trend in the NFL and elsewhere; teams have found that instead of cumbersome paper notebooks, sleek iPads or tablets can not only easily replace them but enhance the value of the digital playbooks by allowing for remote upgrades and player feedback.

At least nine NFL teams now use the iPad, with five, the Dallas Cowboys, St. Louis Rams, Seattle Seahawks, Indianapolis Colts, and Detroit Lions, signing on with Global Apptitude last month. MLB has also been increasingly active in this area as well.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apple, Apps, Dallas Cowboys, Denver Broncos, Detroit Lions, iPad, Live sports via mobile, NFL, PlayerLync, Tablets Tagged With: , ,
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