Episode 4 of the STADIUM TECH REPORT PODCAST is live, in which hosts Phil Harvey and Paul Kapustka go to the mats to figure out if WrestleMania and the associated WWE operations are the perfect storm for mobile-content creation. We also discuss why WrestleMania and events like it are capable of creating massive demands for in-stadium bandwidth, like the latest big wireless day at WrestleMania 32 at AT&T Stadium. Listen now and let us know what you think!
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The Undertaker arrives at AT&T Stadium for WrestleMania 32. Photo: WWE.com
The 101,763 fans who filled AT&T Stadium Sunday for WrestleMania 32 set new stadium records for Wi-Fi, according to figures provided by AT&T Stadium and AT&T, with 6.77 terabytes of Wi-Fi traffic and an additional 1.9 TB on the AT&T network on the stadium’s DAS for a total wireless figure of 8.6 TB.
The Wi-Fi numbers put Sunday’s signature WWE event (also the biggest WrestleMania by attendance) into second place in our unofficial record-keeping of the largest single-day Wi-Fi traffic stadium events. Only Super Bowl 50 at Levi’s Stadium earlier this year was bigger, with 10.1 TB of Wi-Fi traffic. So far, WrestleMania 32 is also now third in combined Wi-Fi and DAS figures, trailing Super Bowl 50 and Super Bowl XLIX (see charts below).
1. Super Bowl 50, Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, Calif., Feb. 7, 2016: Wi-Fi: 10.1 TB; DAS: 15.9 TB; Total: 26 TB
2. Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz., Feb. 1, 2015: Wi-Fi: 6.23 TB; DAS: 6.56 TB**; Total: 12.79 TB**
3. WrestleMania 32, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, April 3, 2016: Wi-Fi: 6.77 TB; DAS: 1.9 TB*; Total: 8.6 TB*
* = AT&T DAS stats only
** = AT&T, Verizon Wireless and Sprint DAS stats only
1. Super Bowl 50, Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, Calif., Feb. 7, 2016: Wi-Fi: 10.1 TB
2. WrestleMania 32, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, April 3, 2016: Wi-Fi: 6.77 TB
3. Super Bowl XLIX, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz., Feb. 1, 2015: Wi-Fi: 6.23 TB
4. Alabama vs. Texas A&M, Kyle Field, College Station, Texas, Oct. 17, 2015: Wi-Fi: 5.7 TB
5. College Football Playoff championship game, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, Jan. 12, 2015: Wi-Fi: 4.93 TB
John Winborn, chief information officer for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club, said in an email that the reported claims of the Wi-Fi being offline Sunday — and that being the reason why entry lines were long and slow — were not true. While Winborn did admit that one single Wi-Fi AP (out of the more than 2,000 in the stadium’s network) was offline and there were “a couple issues” with ticket scanners, he said “there were no Wi-Fi issues that would have had a significant impact on ingress.” Other reports have claimed the doors were opened later due to extended show rehearsals, while commenters on MSR’s posts have claimed that a lack of wristbands for stadium-floor seating also led to seating issues even for fans already inside the main building entrances. So far, we have not seen any official explanation for the delays other than the official apology from the stadium and the WWE:
“To ensure the safety of WWE fans, increased security measures were put in place tonight. We apologize that it may have taken some fans longer than usual to get into AT&T Stadium.”
During Sunday’s event Winborn said the Wi-Fi network saw 20,462 concurrent and 34,951 total user connections, some via a network of 150 temporary Wi-Fi APs installed among the seats on the stadium floor.
While Sunday’s WrestleMania 32 eventually ended up with a record attendance for the WWE’s signature event with 101,763 fans in attendance, some snafus with the entry process had fans reporting as long as three-hour waits to get in, with some pegging a Wi-Fi outage that disabled ticket scanners as one of the roots of the problem.
Here's what it looked liked for fans trying to get into #WrestleMania From @dallasnews photog David Guzman pic.twitter.com/BaZS8U5wxN
— Mark Francescutti (@mfrances100) April 4, 2016
We don’t as of yet have any on-the-record comments from AT&T Stadium so we can’t say exactly what the problem was. UPDATE, 4/4/16, 2:50 p.m.: According to John Winborn, chief information officer for the Dallas Cowboys Football Club (and the person who runs the network inside AT&T Stadium), despite the rumors that emerged there was no Wi-Fi outage at the stadium — in fact Winborn said the crowd used 6.77 TB of Wi-Fi data Sunday, a single-day stadium Wi-Fi total second only to the 10.1 TB used at Levi’s Stadium for Super Bowl 50. (More details on the Wi-Fi consumption coming soon.)
Wi-Fi rumors aside, on Sunday night Twitter and Instagram were full of photos from irate fans who were stuck outside the venue, with some reportedly unable to get inside or to their seats before the actual matches started. According to a blog post at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the WWE and the Stadium issued a joint press release halfway through the event that read:
“To ensure the safety of WWE fans, increased security measures were put in place tonight. We apologize that it may have taken some fans longer than usual to get into AT&T Stadium.”
Several other news outlets reported the problem, with all seeming to peg the issue on a Wi-Fi problem with the ticket scanners. Winborn, however, said there were no Wi-Fi outages in the stadium or with the ticket scanners.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram report, the vitriol on Twitter and other social media outlets may not have been entirely correct; according to the report:
Do not believe the viral reports and unsightly online pictures that fans could not get to their seats by the time the early matches began — they could but they preferred to walk around, buy food, drink and merchandise. But the images and the complaints that flooded the Internet about #WrestleMania32 were so plentiful, and negative, joint press release was issued halfway through the event.
With 101,763 finally in their seats the event was the fifth-largest crowd inside AT&T Stadium, and as such most likely produced a large Wi-Fi and DAS traffic number once things finally got underway. We will update this post and have another when we get the wireless traffic stats from the stadium.
WrestleMania 31 at Levi’s Stadium, March 29, 2015. Credit all images: 49ers.com (click on any photo for a larger image)
The WrestleMania mark eclipsed the previous Wi-Fi high-water figure of 3.3 TB, recorded during the Niners’ home opener at Levi’s Stadium on Sept. 14, 2014. However, the WWE event’s record should come with a bit of an interesting asterisk, since the Niners said they built a temporary ground-level extension to the Wi-Fi network that was used by approximately 3,700 fans who were sitting in seats on the field, surrounding the WrestleMania stage. The team also put in extra Wi-Fi coverage for the three temporary seating sections that were erected in the Levi’s Stadium southeast plaza, structures that will likely be part of the configuration for Super Bowl 50 next February.
WrestleMania competition
In a related note, it seems like beefed-up train and bus service from light rail entity VTA kept lines and waits to a minimum, even with a record number of fans also using public transportation to the event. At the very least, the Levi’s Stadium team seems to be back on a positive path after some painful lessons learned during the Feb. 21 Coors Light Stadium Series hockey game. Remember also that WWE did not want in-seat food or merchandise delivery available during the event, which proabably helped make network operations easier.
According to Hacker the field-level network used 76 extra access points, with 69 on the field level itself and seven more on the field-level walls. Hacker said a combination of picocell and handrail enclosures were used for the temporary network, which was necessary since the regular stadium-bowl configuration was never designed to handle traffic for events with fans on the field level.
Hacker also said the temporary network had its own switching infrastructure, with eight portable switching pods connected by both fiber and outdoor Ethernet cabling. The results from the WrestleMania event, Hacker said, will help the Niners and Levi’s Stadium staff prepare for future events with on-field seating, like the concerts scheduled for later this spring and summer.
The Niners said their goal with the WrestleMania temporary network “experiment” (which they believe to be the first ever done for a large outdoor event) was to see whether the Levi’s Stadium under-seat design could be extended to the field for temporary events “in a cost-effective, safe and repeatable manner. From what we experienced with WrestleMania 31, every indication is that we will be able to do that.”
Some more network stats from the WrestleMania 31 event:
— The peak concurrent user mark was 14,800 on the Wi-Fi network at around 8:10 p.m.
— The Wi-Fi network carried 1.61 Gbps of average continuous bandwidth from 2:20 p.m. to 8:00 p.m., also a new stadium record
— The peak bandwidth usage was 2.474 Gbps at 7:10 p.m.
— Usage on the Levi’s Stadium DAS network was not reported.
Overhead shot of Levi’s Stadium during WrestleMania 31, showing on-field seating
Screen shot of Levi’s Stadium app with in-seat delivery option missing in action. Credit: Paul Kapustka, MSR
Louise Callagy, vice president of marketing for Levi’s Stadium app developer VenueNext, said Monday that the choice not to have in-seat food and beverage delivery was made by the WWE, and not by Levi’s Stadium officials, or by the San Francisco 49ers, or by VenueNext.
“Levi’s Stadium plays host to many shows and producers, and as part of that, these producers get to decide how they want to use the stadium and the Levi’s Stadium app,” said Callagy in an email reply. “We provide recommendations and they make choices. For Wrestlemania, we understand WWE chose to provide fans the option to order food and drink via Express pick up only, because they did not want to distract guests from the show with in seat deliveries.”
Since we haven’t yet talked to anyone from WWE, it’s unknown if the organization’s decision to “tap out” on in-seat delivery was influenced at all by the snafu that surfaced during the recent Coors Light Stadium Series hockey game at Levi’s Stadium, when a flood of in-seat orders apparently overwhelmed either the app operations or the runner staff, resulting in numerous orders being stalled and/or cancelled without explanation. The Wrestlemania event will be the first big-time professional or college event at Levi’s without the in-seat delivery service available since the Niners’ home opener last Sept. 14. In-seat delivery was available at all Niners’ home games this past season, as well as at two college games and at the hockey game on Feb. 21.
Taking a look at the Levi’s Stadium app on our phone on Monday, with its Wrestlemania 31 cover, the in-seat delivery feature is already gone from the top menu list of app functionality. What is still appearing is the “Express Pickup” feature, where fans at the stadium can use the app to order and pay for food ahead of time and then pick it up at the closest concessions window, theoretically avoiding the long lines that regularly plague all stadiums, including Levi’s.
When you think of the WWE do you think of baseball? No? How about Sony? How about Whistle Partners- even heard of them? What they all have in common is a connection to Major League Baseball’s Advanced Media arm, a partnership created by all MLB teams that handles its Internet, digital and interactive technology, everything from behind the scenes backroom technology to the latest in games.
If you wonder why this is important consider that MLBAM is estimated to have earned $620 million in 2012, and is rapidly extending its reach into both baseball and non baseball activities. Aside from running the MLB and Minor League Baseball websites it also runs websites for YES Networks, SportsNet NewYork and others. In backroom technology it delivers infrastructure to a variety of entities including Southwest Airlines, CBSSportsline and WatchESPN.
It has recently expanded with a flurry of new deals and announcements in the last few weeks. It now will provide back end infrastructure for Sony when that company delivers its planned cloud-based TV service. It will also be providing the technology that backs the World Wrestling Entertainment’s planned 24/7 streaming network that is expected to launch next month.
It has also entered into a deal with The Whistle, a new sports entertainment network that is targeted at young fans and athletes. MLBAM will be providing technology services and infrastructure support for the network.
In the area of games it already has one of the most popular apps of all time at the Apple app store with MLB.Com At Bat, and that is just one of a host of games that it has available for fans during the season, and you can now add another to that list, or will be able to soon.
The MLBAM has announced that it will bring back from the dead RBI Baseball, to be called RBI Baseball 14, a game that has not been available for 20 years. Details are not available as yet as to what the latest generation of the game will look like but it is expected to be available for consoles as well as for smartphones and tablets.
We are not even mentioning the programs that MLBAM has set up for baseball that include Facebook, Instagram and other social media or its move to allow fans to upgrade tickets, order food and other activities with mobile devices. These are capabilities that it could also expand on and help other sports leagues deploy for their fans.
What do all of the activities mean? It could be a sign that it is getting all of its ducks in a row prior to making a run at an IPO, according to Forbes and other sources. It is estimated that MLBAM is worth as much as $6 to $8 billion and that with the current hot IPO market MLB could cash in on its media arm, even keeping half to retain control would result in a pretty penny in all of the teams’ owners pockets.
Our latest report provides an in-depth look at the new Wi-Fi 6 network deployed at Coors Field, ahead of the All-Star Game. READ THE ISSUE NOW
