MLB – Page 6

Verizon: Series fans used 5.3 TB of cellular data at Wrigley Field, 15.4 TB at Progressive Field

November 9, 2016 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

Cubs victory celebration in Chicago’s Grant Park. Credit: KIICHIRO SATO/AP from Cubs.com.

We now have the Verizon Wireless stats for cellular usage by fans at Chicago’s Wrigley Field during the recent World Series, and according to Verizon fans on its cellular network in the stadium used a total of 5.3 terabytes of data for the three games at the Friendly Confines. Verizon also said that for the four games at the Cleveland Indians’ Progressive Field, Verizon saw a combined 15.4 TB of wireless data on its cellular network.

Combined with AT&T’s previously announced total of 3 TB on its network over the three games gives us a total of 8.3 TB of DAS usage for the top two wireless carriers for the three Chicago Cubs home games during the Fall Classic. For the Cleveland games, the 15.4 TB on Verizon and 2 TB on AT&T comes to 14.4 TB combined.

Outside the games, Verizon added that Chicagoans used another 6.5 TB of data along the World Series celebration parade route last Friday. According to a published report, AT&T’s network in Chicago saw 10.5 TB of traffic during the parade; we haven’t been able to confirm that number with AT&T directly but with 5 million fans estimated taking place in the celebration, 17 TB of combined data usage sounds about right.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, Major League Baseball, Verizon Wireless Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, Grant Park, MLB, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, World Series, Wrigley Field

Cubs see 3 TB of cellular data on AT&T network during World Series games at Wrigley

November 3, 2016 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

As expected, the just-concluded 2016 World Series between the Chicago Cubs and the Cleveland Indians saw big totals for in-stadium wireless data use, with AT&T customers using almost 5 terabytes of total data, with 3 TB recorded during the three games at Chicago’s Wrigley Field and another 2 TB in the four games at Cleveland’s Progressive Field.

According to statistics of traffic on AT&T’s DAS (distributed antenna system) cellular networks in and around the stadiums, the biggest single-game total was a mark of 1+ TB at Wrigley Field for Game 3. While there was less overall traffic on the AT&T DAS at Progressive Field, some of the fan data in Cleveland most likely was carried by the stadium’s Wi-Fi network; Wrigley’s new Wi-Fi network is still under construction and was not available to fans for this season.

Thanks to AT&T, here is a game-by-game breakdown of the DAS traffic totals. Remember, this is for AT&T customers only on AT&T networks. Any other carriers out there who want to add their totals to this mix, you know where to find us!

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, Major League Baseball, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, MLB, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Progressive Field, Stadium Wi-Fi, World Series, Wrigley Field

The MSR Interview: San Francisco Giants CIO Bill Schlough

November 1, 2016 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

AT&T Park CIO Bill Schlough shows off his World Series bling.

Who better to talk about stadium Wi-Fi than the guy who was there when it all started? Our guest for our first MSR Interview (part of our Stadium Tech Report Podcast series) is San Francisco Giants senior vice president and chief information officer Bill Schlough, who goes old-school talking about stadium Wi-Fi back in 2004… and brings it to the current day with stats from the most recent season at AT&T Park. Plus, his thoughts on game-day apps and why great connectivity is the real winner. Listen in now!

Hear Bill talk about:

— New Wi-Fi records set… during the Warriors’ playoff run

— Why going under-seat with Wi-Fi was a necessary thing to do

— How the Giants are experimenting with virtual reality

— Why he thinks great connectivity matters most (even more than stadium-app features)

Some story links that offer some history about AT&T Park’s networks from MSR:

S.F. Giants add more Wi-Fi, ‘virtual reality experience’ to AT&T Park for 2016 season

SF Giants fans used 78.2 TB of Wi-Fi data at AT&T Park during 2015 season

Stadium Tech Report: World Series set new wireless records at AT&T Park

Stadium Tech Report: San Francisco’s AT&T Park lives up to its wireless reputation

Giants: NLCS stadium Wi-Fi usage at AT&T Park quadrupled since 2012

SUBSCRIBE TO THE PODCAST:

Here is the link to the podcast on iTunes!

Filed Under: 4G LTE, Apps, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Golden State Warriors, Major League Baseball, NBA, San Francisco Giants, Sprint, T-Mobile, Twitter, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, AT&T Park, Bill Schlough, Cisco, DAS, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, NBA, Paul Kapustka, San Francisco Giants, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, Virtual Reality, Wi-Fi, World Series

World Series fans will have Wi-Fi + DAS at Cleveland’s Progressive Field; cellular only at Wrigley

October 25, 2016 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

If you are lucky, loaded or devoted enough to have tickets to any of this year’s World Series games, you will have more connectivity choices at Cleveland’s Progressive Field than at Chicago’s Wrigley Field. Thanks to a Verizon-built Wi-Fi and a separate DAS network that both came online in 2014, the home of the AL champion Indians should be ready for the bucket-list traffic pressures that come with hosting World Series games.

When the series moves to Chicago later this week, the Wrigley cell network will need to carry the full load, as renovations that are bringing new Wi-Fi and DAS systems to the Friendly Confines are not yet in place (and may not be finished until 2018, according to the Cubs).

However, the cellular networks at Wrigley Field seem to be working just fine — according to AT&T, during the three league championship series games in Chicago, fans who are AT&T customers used 2.6 terabytes of data on the AT&T networks at the ballpark. For the three games at Dodger Stadium, AT&T said it saw a total of 2.0 TB used on its networks. Fans at Progressive Field, meanwhile, used a total of 340 GB during games 1 and 2 of the ALCS on AT&T networks. Expect that number to grow this week.

For fans attending the games in Cleveland (Game 1 is Oct. 25 and Game 2 is Oct. 26; games 6 and 7, if necessary, will also be in Cleveland) there should be plenty of local cellular capacity thanks to the beefing-up brought by carriers ahead of this summer’s Republican convention; we are also guessing that all the big wireless providers are doing their usual big-event preparations, which usually means portable cellular equipment for placement around the stadiums and in other fan areas. Anyone attending the games, send us a speedtest… so we can keep score on the networks!

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, Major League Baseball, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Chicago Cubs, Cleveland Indians, DAS, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Progressive Field, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi, Wrigley Field

Minnesota Twins’ Target Field: Photo Essay and Wi-Fi tests

July 4, 2016 by Paul Kapustka Leave a Comment

Great sight to see when you get off the plane in Minnesota.

During Mobile Sports Report’s visit to Minneapolis earlier this summer, we had a free afternoon so we took the public tour of the Minnesota Twins’ Target Field, home of the 2014 MLB All Star Game. Though it was a kind of drizzly day we still got a lot of looks (and tests) of the thing we came to see: The park’s new Wi-Fi and DAS networks, which were operational and since it was an empty house, probably running at full capacity for all our tests.

After a short (~30 min.) light rail trip from the airport to downtown, we dumped our bags at the hotel and hoofed it over to Target Field, staying dry by cleverly using the city’s skywalk pathways. Once at the stadium it was just a short wait for the 3 p.m. tour to start, so we cruised the Twins’ gift store where the full-body Twins jammies made us think of cold September nights.

Tech you can and can’t see

Target Field from a nearby walkway. Notice the freeway running underneath.

I’d never been on one of these public tours before, but our group of 7 dudes learned a lot of lore from our excellent guide Rick, who had his stats down cold. The big glove outside the stadium, he let us know, is 522 feet from home plate, the longest home run recorded by Twins legend Harmon Killebrew. That home run was hit in 1967 at the old Metropolitan Stadium, where the Mall of America now stands.

Rick started out our tour by informing us that the $600 million Target Field, which opened in 2010, has a whole lot of technology under the field, pipes that heat the field and carry water away from it; there’s no dirt on the playing field, just sand underneath a very thin covering of grass. Baseball capacity now is 38,868, Rick said, though on opening day the park had 40,000+ there. That’s great stuff, man, but what about the Wi-Fi? Though I couldn’t get a Wi-Fi signal outside the gates, once inside the network was clearly humming: As Rick took us through the press box, where there were Ethernet cords in front of each seat, I wondered how necessary those were with a reading of 59.26 Mbps down and 62.67 up as I sat in a front-row seat.

Twins jammies for those cold Minnesota nights.

As one the MLBAM-led technology deployment deals (in part to get ready for the All Star Game demands) the Wi-Fi inside Target Field is mainly Cisco gear, at least those that you can see. The familiar white boxes (now with MLBAM ID stickers) are fairly ubiquitous. Since we weren’t able to get ahold of the Twins’ IT crew before our visit I’m not sure what the final AP or DAS antenna count is these days. But if you know where to look, and we do, you can see a lot of antennas around.

Dealing with outside-the-park interference

One of the interesting things we learned in our profile of the park prior to the All Star Game was that since the stadium is right downtown, the Twins and the major carriers had to figure out how to keep macro antennas on buildings outside the ballpark from bleeding into the stadium’s DAS. According to another source we spoke with in Minnesota, this year was the first year that Target Field’s DAS didn’t need any more alterations; as you can see by one of pictures here of the Ford Center, which is across the street from the back side of Target Field, there’s a lot of RF on rooftops in the near vicinity.

Inside the press box. Grandpa, what’s that cord for?

Down near field level, the Wi-Fi was still cranking in the mid-40s, an excellent score for a place that’s normally hard to cover. Looking around I didn’t initially see any APs, with none on the wall facing backwards as some stadiums do it. Then after some more inspection I saw the source of the bandwidth, some well-covered railing APs mounted on the railing behind the 10 or so rows of near-the-field seats. On our way out I saw some of the distinctive AmpThink-designed sideways railing enclosures, for the open-bowl seating not covered by overhangs.

Though ideally we’d love to come back on a game day, from the looks of the physical placements we were able to see and the tests we took, it seems like both the cellular and Wi-Fi networks at Target Field are high performers, good news for Twins fans who need connectivity. And if you need to drown your sorrows or celebrate, there is also an in-stadium beer network, which supplies suds from main keg rooms through conduits that are definitely more tasty than copper or fiber. Prosit!

Credit all photos: Paul Kapustka, MSR

Target Field in panoramic view.

A silhouette of a Wi-Fi antenna. MSR geek art.

A Wi-Fi AP and some kind of gun antenna. Anyone know what that is?

You bought it, you put your name on it.

Another panoramic view, showing how close downtown is.

The Ford Center is across the street from the back of the park. We’re guessing those macro antennas on top had to be tuned to keep their signals from interfering.

Not Wi-Fi, but a network worth building for thirsty fans.

Anyone want to test download speeds of these pipes?

Great quote overheard in Minnesota: “It takes a lot of wire to make a park wireless.”

Tour guide Rick getting set to take his “team” out on the field. BUT NOT ON THE GRASS!

The railing APs that cover the field-level seats.

An AmpThink railing enclosure. Rick didn’t know what those were, but he does now.

Nice hardware in the Twins’ high-rollers club area.

Our tour didn’t get to see inside, but we can guess what’s behind that door.

If you can hit one here, the Twins want to talk to you.

That’s about as close as MSR will ever get to being in “The Show.” Until next time!

Filed Under: 4G LTE, All Star Game, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Major League Baseball, Minnesota Twins, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, All Star Game, AT&T, Cisco, DAS, Harmon Killebrew, Mall of America, Minneapolis, Minnesota Twins, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, Stadium Wi-Fi, Target Field, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi

St. Louis Cardinals team with MLBAM for Busch Stadium Wi-Fi

June 27, 2016 by Terry Sweeney Leave a Comment

Busch Stadium, St. Louis, home of a new MLBAM Wi-FI network. Credit all photos: St. Louis Cardinals

Working closely with Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media initiative, the St. Louis Cardinals activated what’s being billed as the league’s largest wireless deployment, at least if you measure by overall square footage. The system went live in a phased introduction the week before Memorial Day, according to Cardinals’ director of IT Perry Yee.

More than 740 Wi-Fi access points were installed to accommodate fans at Busch Stadium, including the AT&T Rooftop, as well the Busch II Infield and the Budweiser Brewhouse rooftop deck across Clark Ave. from the stadium at Ballpark Village, where the Cardinals played til 2005. The Cards’ wireless deployment was part of a $300 million initiative headed by MLBAM to build out Wi-Fi and DAS in all the league’s ballparks, with MLB, wireless carriers and teams all sharing in the costs. (While Busch may be the largest MLBAM deployment, AT&T Park in San Francisco has baseball’s most-dense Wi-Fi and DAS network by antenna numbers; the networks at AT&T Park are run by the Giants and AT&T.)

Yee said the Cardinals experienced relatively few engineering issues, in part because of the relative newness of the stadium. He also credited MLBAM, which took the Cardinals’ design and selected a systems integrator and an equipment vendor (Cisco).

“It’s a real turnkey solution where you submit the blueprint [to MLBAM] and they start locating the APs,” Yee said. “Where we come in is we have the background experience to tell the design team where people congregate and how often different spaces get used.”

Putting Wi-Fi in the railings

Editor’s note: This profile is from our most recent STADIUM TECH REPORT, the Q2 issue which contains a feature story on Wi-Fi analytics, and a sneak peek of the Minnesota Vikings’ new US Bank Stadium. DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY today!

Wi-Fi railing enclosure.

Busch Stadium, with a capacity of 46,861, is also blessed with good lines of sight to the field; the only real obstructions are near the foul poles. That’s great for fans, but creates challenges in that there are consequently fewer structures on which to mount antennas. That meant getting inventive in some areas, like installing Wi-Fi antennas in the handrails, and drilling the conduits from underneath seats to keep trip hazards and visual distractions to a minimum.

“Over in Ballpark Village, we had brick on the outside of building so we had to be careful — that was an issue for the electricians to figure out,” Yee said, quickly adding that the electricians on projects like these rarely get the recognition they deserve. “The designer can say where the antennas go, but the electricians have to figure out how to get power to that spot and do it in a manner that fits the building,” he said.

Cardinal fans trying to access the network hit a gated page that asks which cell carrier they use and also to accept terms and conditions; the Cardinals can then track usage and capacity by carrier and take that information back to the three carriers with DAS service in Busch Stadium: AT&T, Sprint and Verizon Wireless. “If Sprint, for example, notices they have lot more customers than anticipated, it might be time for them to review their capacity,” Yee said.

Cards director of IT Perry Yee

There’s also an option on the gating page for users to share their email if they want to subscribe to the Cardinal newsletter, Yee added.

MLB app the center of activity focus

The Busch Stadium Wi-Fi network is new enough that MLBAM still is in the process of handing over management and oversight to the Cardinals’ organization; that makes it hard to track certain numbers — like what the budget was the for the project and how much money each entity contributed, numbers which MLBAM has not revealed for any of the many deployments it led throughout the league.

The Cardinals also aren’t releasing any official throughput or usage thresholds yet. Yee said he has seen speeds of 100 Mbps up and down and up on his Samsung S5 phone during more exciting parts of a recent game when fewer users were online. That number dipped to 20-30 Mbps during quieter parts of game. “It was a really good game — for half an hour no one was on the Wi-Fi, then when the score went in one direction I began to see speeds going down as people got online,” Yee said.

Lower level seats are covered with APs that shoot backwards into the stands.

The Cardinals are looking to use the league’s Ballpark mobile app as the focal point for digital ticketing and inseat ordering plans. One hurdle to inseat ordering isn’t technical; it’s making sure the concessionaire can receive the data. “There’s lots of backend components to establish and flesh out before it becomes a real thing — lots of logistics to make these things happen,” Yee said.

The Cardinals have been using Bluetooth-based beacon technology for a couple years now. “We use it at our gates to greet people and it works via the Ballpark app,” Yee said. For now, the beaconing only works with iPhones; they’ll add support for Android devices at some point. But Yee foresees using beacon technology all around Busch Stadium at points of interest like the Stan Musial statue, providing information about who he was, what he did, to fans in proximity of the monument.

The Cardinals are still considering whether to deploy ambassadors in the stands during games to help people with connectivity issues and other questions. Longer term, they’re looking at geofencing with the concession areas or team store for specials and sale items — “Hot dogs on sale for this inning,” Yee mused. That’s way off in the future, the Cardinals’ IT director added.

In the meantime, the focus will be on “infrastructure that allows fans to see more and do more that makes the games more enjoyable,” Yee said.

Filed Under: 4G LTE, AT&T, Baseball, Cisco, DAS, Major League Baseball, Samsung, Sprint, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi Tagged With: 4G LTE, AT&T, Busch Stadium, DAS, MLB, MLBAM, Mobile Sports Report, Paul Kapustka, St. Louis Cardinals, Stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon Wireless, Wi-Fi