Sixty percent of Super Bowl LVII attendees were Verizon customers, and together, they used 47.8 TB of data
Ahead of Super Bowl LVII, Verizon invested more than $100 million in network upgrades and enhancements in and around State Farm Stadium and the greater Phoenix area. Inside the stadium, Verizon installed 490 5G nodes — 66 of which are the carrier’s newest 5G mmWave nodes — and 1,400 4G and 5G antennas. This investment, the carrier’s Vice President of Device Technology Brian Mecum told RCR Wireless News at Mobile World Congress 2023, paid off.
Of the 67,827 in-person Super Bowl fans, 60% were Verizon customers, and together, they used 47.8 TB of data, which is a 57% increase from last year’s game and is equivalent to a single user binge-watching HD video for more than three years. “Eight minutes into the second quarter, [our customers] used more traffic now than [they] did at SoFi for all of last year’s game,” Mecum said, adding that upward trend in data use will continue as long as more network capacity continues to be made available.
Mecum also shared that while Verizon did deploy C-Band spectrum at the State Farm Stadium, mmWave was still the “star” of the show in terms of what made this staggering amount of traffic possible, aided in part by how many handsets are mmWave compatible.
While fans hopped onto the Verizon 5G network to scroll through social media posts, text friends and maybe even swipe right on a dating app, they overwhelmingly engaged with video content. Verizon’s 5G network enabled low-latency video — productized as Verizon 5G Multi-View — which enables fans to view up to seven simultaneous camera angles, allowing them watch a game on their phone from different angles and, according to Mecum, go back and review moments faster than even the referees could. “It created personalization and a connection with the game that people didn’t have before,” said Mecum. “We’ve proven to ourselves that one of the things that personifies 5G is video.”
If video is the epitome of 5G for fan engagement, then voice is king when it comes to NFL communications. Verizon provides a managed private wireless solution across each of the 30 U.S. NFL stadiums to support secure and reliable coach-to-coach communications on the field because during a game, every second counts and every word matters. “Every time [coaches] talk, they do it over our private network. [They] can’t miss a single word,” Mecum highlighted.
He added that in the future, of course, the NFL will use a private network for more than just coach-to-coach communications, but the specifics of those other applications remain to be seen, or at least, made public. “Wherever you have a bunch of people who need to be all synced up — concerts, tournaments, workers in a warehouse or on an airport tarmac — and you need high quality voice [and] need to be able to hear in a very loud environment… from a private network standpoint, you’ve hit the sweet spot right there,” Mecum stated.
In related news, Verizon this week added 45 nodes delivering both C-Band and mmWave coverage at the NRG Stadium in Houston, Texas. Further, Verizon deployed a technology that divides crowds into sectors “like slices of a pie,” allowing engineers to adjust each slice individually to curate the network performance based on where stadium attendees move and how they use data.
