Inside the AT&T head-end building at MetLife. Cables! Credit: AT&T
Part of the gain no doubt came from the fact that MetLife Stadium holds approximately 10,000 more fans during a football game than the Superdome, 82,566 to 72,003. But AT&T’s numerical evidence — including a new peak-time high of 119 GB during the hour before kickoff — shows that the desire to access mobile devices inside stadiums is still growing, especially at big games like the Super Bowl.
Verizon Wireless, which like AT&T spent more than a year getting MetLife’s network ready for Sunday’s game, also said it had experienced record traffic on its networks, claiming a total of 1.9 TB of cellular traffic inside MetLife Stadium. During the game Verizon Twitter accounts said new traffic records were set before halftime; however we still have no figures from Verizon for previous years’ data for comparison.
Total VZW data usage in-stadium Sunday more than 1.9 TB – highest data usage we’ve ever seen at aSuper Bowl @VZWNews http://t.co/DG0HvVTKDz
— Tom Pica (@VZWtom) February 3, 2014
Verizon also claimed its peak hour usage was “800 percent” greater than last year’s, but again, we don’t have exact numbers so can’t confirm the accuracy of such claims. Still unkown is how much traffic was carried by the stadium Wi-Fi network which Verizon manages (and was free to all MetLife fans), since Verizon did not provide Wi-Fi traffic numbers. Our guess is it saw similar traffic leaps as AT&T’s and Verizon’s cellular nets.
Another interesting note from the AT&T data is a trend toward more mobile data use, and fewer voice calls. Fans at the game Sunday made 55,000 voice calls on AT&T networks, down from 73,000 calls in 2012. Some of that might have to do with the fact that last year’s game had a lengthy power outage, which no doubt prompted many “I’m OK” calls to loved ones. But still — a 20,000 call dropoff in the face of more than doubling data traffic seems to show that people are using their phones more, even if they are talking less.
