Niners fans use 2.76 TB of Wi-Fi for season opener at Levi’s Stadium

September 23, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

Niners fans celebrate a touchdown in the season opener. Credit: LevisStadium.com.

Fans at the San Francisco 49ers’ home opener used 2.76 terabytes of data on the Wi-Fi network at Levi’s Stadium, according to statistics provided by the Niners’ network team.

The Sept. 12 Monday Night Football game, a 28-0 win for the Niners over the visiting Los Angeles Rams, was well below the 10.1-TB mark recorded during Super Bowl 50, held at Levi’s Stadium back in February. Still, the 2.76 TB is a healthy regular-season game mark, with 16,681 unique users of the Wi-Fi network as well as a maximum concurrent number of users of 11,987.

The Niners also added some interesting new social twists to the Levi’s Stadium experience this year, including the ability for fans to use the stadium app to respond to poll questions (like voting on the next song to be played during timeouts) posted on the stadium’s large digital displays. While it’s not known if the feature was used during the regular season opener, according to the network team 30,000 fans participated in big-board polls during the Niners’ preseason game on Aug. 26 versus the Green Bay Packers. Full stats from the Niners networking team below.

Patriots upgrade Wi-Fi at Gillette Stadium for 2016 season

September 22, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

Gillette Stadium before the Sept. 18 game vs. the Miami Dolphins. Credit: Steve Milne, AP, via Patriots.com

Gillette Stadium, one of the first NFL arenas to have fan-facing Wi-Fi, more than doubled the number of access points in the venue this past offseason, according to team executives.

Fred Kirsch, who goes by the curious title of publisher & vice president of content at Kraft Sports Productions, is well known in stadium tech circles as the overseer of all things technology for the New England Patriots operation. In a recent phone interview, Kirsch said “the timing was right” for a Wi-Fi upgrade at Gillette, a venue that has had fan-facing Wi-Fi since 2012. The team’s first full-stadium network was installed by Enterasys Networks, which was later acquired by Extreme; prior to that, Gillette Stadium had Wi-Fi for luxury suites and clubs provided by gear from Xirrus.

“The [Wi-Fi] overall technology has changed, so we can really improve it now,” said Kirsch about the team’s decision to beef up its wireless network. With new Wi-Fi standards now in most equipment, Kirsch said it was possible to “put in a lot more APs without channel bleed. All over the stadium, we have better coverage.”

Going under-seat in the bowl

According to Kirsch, Gillette Stadium had previously had about 400 Wi-Fi APs in the original design. After the upgrade was over, Kirsch said the stadium now has more than 1,000 APs, with most of the new devices deployed under seats in the bowl seating areas, the latest team to join this growing deployment trend.

In most of the bowl, Kirsch said his team was able to core through the concrete to install the APs; however, some parts of the stadium sit directly upon granite, leading Kirsch and his crew to improvise a cable-and-tray system to get cabling to the APs under the seats. This procedure necessitated custom-designed enclosures, which introduced a small delay in construction procedures, according to Kirsch.

On the game-day application side of things, Kirsch said that the team’s YinzCam-developed app will support faster access to instant replays, and will also add in a third-party option for fans to take a picture of something that might seem astray (like, perhaps, a broken pipe in a restroom) and send it in via the app. Kirsch said the app will be able to geo-locate where the picture came from, giving the team a precise location of the problem.

Filed Under: Apps, Extreme Networks, NFL, Wi-Fi, YinzCam Tagged With: Extreme Networks, Fred Kirsch, Gillette Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, New England Patriots, NFL, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Wi-Fi, YinzCam

Twitter’s NFL streaming debut fails on Tweet front; will AT&T and Verizon eventually dominate mobile device NFL streaming?

September 21, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

Twitter’s debut in live-streaming NFL games had good video, but the accompanying Twitter feed — which users couldn’t configure — left many observers wanting more. Will Twitter ever be able to deliver, or will physics keep Twitter from being able to add anything special to mobile-device sports streaming? In the latest STADIUM TECH REPORT PODCAST, co-hosts Phil Harvey and Paul Kapustka dissect Twitter’s streaming issues, and wonder when people will realize that AT&T and Verizon may be the eventual winners in the NFL streaming battle with their Sunday Ticket and NFL Mobile platforms. Listen now!

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Filed Under: Apps, AT&T, ESPN, Live sports via mobile, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, DirecTV, how to watch Super Bowl online, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, NFL Mobile, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, streaming NFL games, Sunday Ticket, Twitter, watching NFL online

Cowboys hit 2+ TB, Texas A&M sees 1.8+ TB in first AT&T DAS stats for 2016 football season

September 19, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

With the first few football games of the season now under our belts, stats from stadium wireless networks are filtering in with a refrain we’ve heard before: Fan use of wireless data is still growing, with no top reached yet.

Thanks to our friends at AT&T we have the first set of cellular network stats in hand, which show a report of 2.273 terabytes of data used on the AT&T network at AT&T Stadium for the Cowboys’ home opener, a 20-19 loss to the New York Giants on Sept. 11. That same weekend the AT&T network at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, home of the Texas A&M Aggies, saw 1.855 TB of data during Texas A&M’s home opener against UCLA, a 31-24 overtime win over the Bruins.

Remember these stats are for AT&T traffic only, and only for the AT&T network on the DAS installations in and around the stadiums. Any other wireless carriers out there who want to send us statistics, please do so… as well as team Wi-Fi network totals. Look for more reports soon! AT&T graphics below on the first week results. We figure you can figure out which stadiums they’re talking about by the town locations.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Cisco, Dallas Cowboys, DAS, NCAA Football, NFL Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, AT&T Stadium, Cisco, Dallas Cowboys, DAS, Kyle Field, Mobile Sports Report, NCAA, NFL, Paul Kapustka, Texas A&M

Ookla shares Speedtest data from CenturyLink Field, other stadiums

September 12, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

Ookla ad banner being flown over CenturyLink Field in Seattle. Credit: Ookla

Anyone who follows Mobile Sports Report knows that I use the Speedtest app from Ookla to measure stadium network performance whenever I visit a sporting venue. While my one-man tests do show some measure of network power, I always dreamed of harnessing the results from many fans at the same game to see a better picture of the network performance.

Well, Speedtest’s creators think along the same lines, and conducted an experiment during an Aug. 25 Seattle Seahawks preseason game at CenturyLink Field in Seattle. You can read their very thorough post and neat results here, with some interesting twists — for instance, the cellular networks are way faster than the CenturyLink Wi-Fi, according to the Ookla results.

UPDATE: Ookla responded to our email and let us know that on Aug. 25, there were 252 Speedtests at CenturyLink Field, a great sampling to draw results from. Ookla also talked about tests from 12 different events at CenturyLink Field, and said in the email that across those events it saw 1,143 tests conducted.

Ookla also published some test result totals from other stadiums as well, including Levi’s Stadium, AT&T Stadium and Bank of America Stadium, but didn’t say when those tests were recorded, or how many tests were taken.

What we really like, however, is that Ookla’s tests show what our stadium tech report surveys have been showing — that overall, in-stadium network performance is steadily improving. Over time, more data like this can help dispel the still-lingering rumor that stadium networks don’t deliver good connectivity. Now if we could only get Ookla to partner with us to do league-wide or college-comparison speedtests… anyone ready for that idea?

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, DAS, Extreme Networks, Levi's Stadium, NFL, Seattle Seahwaks, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, AT&T Stadium, Bank of America Stadium, CenturyLink Field, DAS, Extreme Networks, Levi's Stadium, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, Paul Kapustka, Seattle Seahawks, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

Verizon drops data charges for live NFL streaming via NFL Mobile app

September 9, 2016 by Paul Kapustka

Are you ready for football? And are you ready for cellular company wars around viewing football on your phone? Verizon kicked off the 2016 NFL season with an announcement Friday that it would no longer charge its customers for data used while watching live NFL games via the NFL Mobile app, perhaps the biggest sign that the battle we predicted is now fully underway.

From our perspective, some of the most-read stories in Mobile Sports Report history have been posts wondering about how much data customers might use watching a live football game on their phones. The answer now, for Verizon LTE customers, is easy: It’s zero. You will still need to pay $1.99 a month this fall to watch RedZone on your phone (to us, RedZone is even better than specific live games), but watching the live local and national-broadcast games (like Sunday night games and Monday Night Football) won’t chew up any of the gigabytes in your data plan.

Whether or not this type of “free programming” will spark any net neutrality debate is best left for other outlets, though it’s hard to think of a type of programming more popular than live NFL action. In the meantime, our guess is that the wildly popular NFL Mobile app (Verizon never releases figures on how many users it has for NFL Mobile, but if you start your guessing between 5 and 10 million you might not be far off) will get even more popular, and the promotion should help sell a lot of fence-sitters this weekend on buying with Verizon, just to get even the app’s limited NFL schedule for basically free.

The promotion may not even cost Verizon much when it comes to minutes, since many NFL Mobile veterans I know (some of whom are already tweeting in agreement to the next statement) almost always seek a Wi-Fi connection when they are streaming NFL Mobile games, because better bandwidth and no data charges. But it’s a hell of a selling point and one we kind-of predicted when we foresaw cell-phone NFL battles between Verizon and its NFL Mobile deal and AT&T’s new ownership of Sunday Ticket thanks to its DirecTV purchase. Too bad the user numbers aren’t ever made public, because it’d be cool to see how many fans are streaming NFL action live on their phones.

We still haven’t been able to get an answer from the NFL or Verizon on another rumor we heard this summer, that RedZone action would be available for free to any fans inside NFL stadiums on game days. Many stadiums already have that ability via apps built by YinzCam, which has a rights agreement with the NFL to allow RedZone viewing in some stadiums. Maybe MSR readers across the country could chime in on whether or not they can see RedZone at their stadium, and we can crowd-source a list. Or we could all just watch more football. Stay tuned, because it’s our guess that this won’t be the last you hear on this front this season.

Remember: You can’t watch NFL Mobile live games on your tablet, because Verizon’s rights package only includes cellular phone-type devices. And be prepared for service to suck this Sunday, because these opening-day things never seem to work out for Verizon and the NFL. Don’t say you weren’t warned!

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, AT&T, Live sports via mobile, NFL, NFL Mobile, NFL Network Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, DirecTV, live NFL streaming, Mobile Sports Report, NFL, NFL Mobile, Paul Kapustka, streaming NFL games, Sunday Ticket, Twitter, Verizon Wireless