AT&T’s heterogeneous network upgrades put into place for the NCAA Men’s Basketball Final Four in Indianapolis apparently paid off.
College basketball fans at Lucas Oil Stadium put the distributed antenna system network to the test using more than 1.52 terabytes of data, a record for a Final Four. According to AT&T, that is enough data for 4.35 million social media posts with photos.
These numbers include the two Final Four games and the National Championship game between the Duke Blue Devils and the Wisconsin Badgers.
AT&T saw data usage explode during the peak traffic time, which was Saturday from 7 p.m. to 8 p.m. EST. During that hour, fans uploaded and downloaded approximately 165 gigabytes of data.
For the tournament as a whole, AT&T recorded more than 4.12 TB transferred among eight tournament sites where they had venue-specific networks. That is the equivalent to streaming high-definition video for six consecutive months, according to AT&T.
The stadium upgrades at Lucas Oil Stadium included a DAS system, a Wi-Fi hot zone and a 12-beam Luneberg Lens similar to the one that AT&T used during the South by Southwest interactive, film and music festival in Austin, Texas.
AT&T said, “Over the last four NCAA Men’s Final Four tournaments (2012 to 2015), total data usage on AT&T’s in-stadium mobile network has increased more than 300 percent both overall and during peak hours.”
It was a good tournament for AT&T overall. The company, which sponsors the tournament’s halftime shows, got mentioned on social media three times more than any other company leading up to the Final Four.
Earlier in the year, AT&T set an all-time data usage record at the College Football National Championship held at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, with 4.94 TB of mobile data used.
