Temporary courtside network helps set Final Four Wi-Fi records

A temporary under-seat Wi-Fi network helped bring connectivity to courtside seats at this year’s Final Four. Credit all photos: Paul Kapustka, MSR (click on any picture for a larger image)

One of the traditional characteristics of the Final Four is the yearly travel scramble of the fortunate fans and teams who have advanced to the championship weekend. Somehow, with only a week’s notice, plane flights, road trips and hotel rooms get scheduled and booked, leading to packed houses at college basketball’s biggest event.

On the stadium technology side, a similar last-minute fire drill happens just about every year as well, as the hosting venues reconfigure themselves to host basketball games inside cavernous buildings built mainly to hold football crowds. At this year’s NCAA Men’s Final Four at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, the stadium tech team and partner AmpThink were able to quickly construct a temporary Wi-Fi network to cover the additional lower-bowl seating. The new capactity was part of a record-setting Wi-Fi network performance at the venue, with single-day numbers surpassing those from Super Bowl 52, held in the same building the year before.

The Wi-Fi numbers, both staggering and sobering especially to venues who are next in line for such bucket-list events, totaled 31.2 terabytes for the two days of game action, according to figures provided by the NCAA. For the semifinal games on Saturday April 6, U.S. Bank Stadium’s Wi-Fi network saw 17.8 TB of traffic, topping the 16.31 TB used during Super Bowl 52 on Feb. 4, 2018. The Saturday semifinals also set an attendance record for the venue, with 72,711 on hand, topping the 67,612 in attendance for Super Bowl 52.

During the championship game on April 8, U.S. Bank Stadium saw an additional 13.4 TB of data used on the Wi-Fi network, giving the venue three of the top four single-day Wi-Fi numbers we’ve reported, with this year’s mark of 24.05 TB at Super Bowl 53 in Atlanta the only bigger number. Saturday’s take rate at U.S. Bank Stadium, however, surpassed even the most-recent Super Bowl, with 51,227 unique users on the network, a 70 percent take rate.

‘Like building an arena network inside a football stadium’

Editor’s note: This report is from our latest STADIUM TECH REPORT, an in-depth look at successful deployments of stadium technology. Included with this report is a profile of the new Wi-Fi network at Allianz Field in St. Paul, Minn., and an in-depth research report on the new Wi-Fi 6 standard! DOWNLOAD YOUR FREE COPY now!

Switches for the temporary network were deployed under the seat scaffolding.

There’s no doubt that the temporary network installed by AmpThink and the U.S. Bank Stadium IT team contributed a great deal to the final Wi-Fi totals, with 250 access points installed in the additional seats. Like at other football venues that are transformed into basketball arenas, U.S. Bank Stadium had temporary seating installed on all four sides of the stadium, with temporary risers stretching down over football seating as well as with risers built behind both baskets. More seats were installed on the “floor” of the football field, right up to the elevated court set in the middle. The temporary APs, like the existing ones in the stadium, are from Cisco.

“There are a lot more moving parts to a Final Four than to a Super Bowl,” said David Kingsbury, director of IT for U.S. Bank Stadium, describing the difference in providing the networking and technical underpinnings for each event. While planning for the networks was obviously done far in advance, the actual buildout of the temporary Wi-Fi couldn’t even begin until the additional seating was in place, a task that finished just five days before the first game was played.

That’s when AmpThink deployed a staff of 12 workers to start connecting cables to APs and to switches, while also adding in another 700 wired network connections to the courtside areas for media internet and TV monitor connections. Like it does for every venue network it designs and deploys, AmpThink came to the stadium equipped with a wide assortment of lengths of pre-terminated cables, preparation that made the fast deployment possible.

“If we had to spin raw cable and terminate it on site, we never would have been able to finish in five days,” said AmpThink president Bill Anderson.

AmpThink’s previous experience in deploying such temporary networks under temporary seating — including at the previous year’s Final Four in San Antonio — taught the company that it would also need protection for under-seat switch deployments, to fend off the inevitable liquid spills from the seats above. That requirement was potentially even more necessary at U.S. Bank Stadium, since this year’s Final Four was the first to allow in-venue sales of alcoholic beverages.

Some temporary seats were deployed on top of existing lower bowl seats.

With some of the temporary seating installed over existing seating, there were 95 APs in the existing handrail-enclosure design that had to be turned off for the Final Four, according to Kingsbury. The 250 new APs added were all installed under the folding chairs, in enclosures that simply sat on the floor.

According to AmpThink’s Anderson, the company did learn a lesson at U.S. Bank Stadium — that it will, at future events, need to secure the actual enclosures since during the weekend curious fans opened a few of the boxes, with one AP disappearing, perhaps as an interesting IT souvenir.

In San Antonio, AmpThink had zip-tied the enclosures to chairs, which led to increased labor to detatch the devices during the post-event breakdown. While having no such measures at U.S. Bank led to a fast removal — AmpThink said it had removed all the temporary network elements just seven hours after the championship game confetti had settled — for next year’s Final Four AmpThink plans to at least zip-tie the enclosures shut so that fans can’t attempt any ad hoc network administration.

More APs for back of house operations

Another difference between the Final Four and the Super Bowl is the fact that four, not two, teams are in attendance for a full weekend, necessitating the need to set up temporary “work rooms” adjacent to each school’s locker room area. The media work center for the Final Four is also typically larger than that of a Super Bowl, again with more cities and their attendant media outlets on site thanks to there being four, not just two, teams involved.

A concourse speed test taken just after halftime of the final game.

“We had to cover a lot of places in the stadium that we don’t normally cover” with wireless and wired network access, Kingsbury said, saying that an additional 30 APs were needed for team rooms and the main media workspace, which were located on the field level of the stadium in the back hallways. An interesting note at U.S. Bank Stadium was that the yards and yards of fabric used as curtains to cover the clear-plastic roofing and wall areas was actually benefical to Wi-Fi operations, since it cut off some of the reflective interference caused by ETFE surfaces.

According to Kingsbury the final count of active APs for the Final Four was 1,414, a number reached by adding in the temporary APs while deducting the ones taken offline. Not included in the official NCAA traffic numbers was an additional 3 TB of traffic seen during the free-admission Friday practice sessions, when 36,000 fans visited the stadium, with 9,000 joining the Wi-Fi network.

From the official stats, the peak concurrent user number from Final Four Saturday of 31,141 was also an overall record, beating Super Bowl 53’s mark of 30,605. (Super Bowl 53 had 70,081 fans in attendance for the Feb. 3 game between the New England Patriots and the Los Angeles Rams.) The Wi-Fi network numbers for Monday’s championship game (won by Virginia 85-77 over Texas Tech in overtime) saw big numbers itself, with 13.4 TB of total data used, and 48,449 unique connections and 29,487 peak concurrent users (out of 72,062 in attendance). Monday’s game also produced a peak throughput number of 11.2 Gbps just after the game ended.

None of those totals could have been reached without the temporary network, which AmpThink’s Anderson compared to “building a 10,000-seat arena network inside a football stadium.” Next stop for a temporary Wi-Fi network is Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta, where the 2020 Final Four awaits.

This is what your football stadium looks like with a championship basketball game inside of it.

The temporary center-hung scoreboard was able to play video programming onto the court surface.

The NBA on TBS crew was courtside for the Final Four.

The secret to keeping your network operations room running? All kinds of energy inputs.

Average per-fan Wi-Fi use total jumps again at Super Bowl 52

Seen in the main concourse at U.S. Bank Stadium: Two IPTV screens, one Wi-Fi AP and a DAS antenna. Credit: Paul Kapustka, MSR

After a year where the actual amount of average Wi-Fi data used per connected fan at the Super Bowl dropped, the trend of more data used per fan reversed itself again to a new peak at Super Bowl 52, with an average total of 407.4 megabytes per user.

Even though the number of unique connections to the Wi-Fi network at U.S. Bank Stadium for Super Bowl 52 also increased to a record 40,033 users (according to the official statistics compiled by Extreme Networks), the jump from 11.8 terabytes of Wi-Fi data used at Super Bowl 51 to 16.31 TB used at Super Bowl 52 pushed the average per-user number to the top, surpassing the 333 MB per user number from Super Bowl 51, as well as the 370 MB per user mark seen at Super Bowl 50.

While this statistic has not ever been called out by the Extreme Networks Super Bowl compilations, we here at MSR think it is a vital mark since it shows that even with more users on the network those connected users are still using more data. That means that IT departments at venues everywhere should probably still plan for no letup in the overall continued growth in demand for bandwidth at large-venue events, especially at “bucket list” events like the Super Bowl.

Last year we guessed the drop in per-user totals from Super Bowl 50 to Super Bowl 51 might have been due to a larger number of autoconnected users, but we never got an answer from the Extreme Networks team when we asked that question. At U.S. Bank Stadium there was also an autoconnect feature to the Wi-Fi for Verizon Wireless customers, but it didn’t seem to affect the per-user total mark.

Minneapolis airport sees 6 TB of Wi-Fi traffic day after Super Bowl

Super Bowl signs hang in the concourse at Minneapolis-St. Paul airport. Credit: MAC (click on any photo for a larger image)

A day after Super Bowl 52 at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis set new records for wireless data consumption, the Minneapolis-St. Paul International airport had a big wireless day of its own, with 6 terabytes of traffic used on the airport’s Wi-Fi network and another 6.5 TB on the Verizon cellular network.

Eduardo Valencia, vice president and chief information officer for the Metropolitan Airports Commission, said the Wi-Fi data used on Feb. 5 was “close to double typical data consumption” on the free-access network provided by Boingo Wireless, even though the airport saw a fairly normal range of users connecting.

“There was no spike in [the number] of users, but the users who did connect consumed twice as much data, with downloads about 3 times normal,” Valencia said. The Monday-departure crowd, he said, saw about 31,000 unique users connect to the Wi-Fi network, which Valencia said “is at the top of the normal user range” the airport network usually sees. Valencia said that during the week leading up to the big game on Feb. 4, the airport Wi-Fi saw between 23,000 and 31,000 daily connections.

Boingo, which has been powering the Wi-Fi at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport (aka MSP) since 2012, updated and expanded coverage a year ago, according to Valencia. Though Boingo would not provide details on how many new APs were added or how many the network has now, Valencia said coverage was increased in many areas, like the tunnels between terminals, to make sure visitors didn’t lose connectivity.

New neutral host DAS from Verizon

Super Bowl LII signage along a moving walkway at MSP. Credit: MAC

The cellular infrastructure at the airport also got an upgrade before the Super Bowl, with a neutral host distributed antenna system (DAS) deployed by Verizon Wireless. The DAS, which uses Corning ONE fiber equipment on the back end, provided coverage for all the top wireless carriers, Valencia said. Though it was cut close — the final pieces went live on Jan. 19, according to Valencia — the expanded DAS, which added antennas all over the terminals as well as outside covering runways, also performed well, according to Valencia.

Though only Verizon stats were available, Valencia said Verizon saw an average of 2.8 TB of data per day in an 11-day span around the Super Bowl, with 6.5 TB of traffic seen on Monday, Feb. 5. Like the Wi-Fi traffic, Valencia said Verizon’s day-after total was about double the average daily consumption.

While there is extra pressure to perform ahead of the NFL’s big game — “The NFL told us the Super Bowl experience begins and ends at the airport,” Valencia said — the payoff will stay for years, as all the new network gear added in advance is permanent.

“We swallowed hard for 9 days, but the success was the culmination of a lot of planning,” Valencia said. “Now the good thing is, everything [in the network] is here to stay.”

Fans use 16.31 TB of Wi-Fi data during Super Bowl 52 at U.S. Bank Stadium

A Wi-Fi handrail enclosure at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis. Credit: Paul Kapustka, MSR (click on any photo for a larger image)

It is now official — we have a new record for most Wi-Fi data used at a single-day event, as fans at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis for Super Bowl 52 used 16.31 terabytes of data on the Wi-Fi network.

According to statistics compiled by Extreme Networks during the Philadelphia Eagles’ thrilling 41-33 victory over the New England Patriots Sunday night, the AmpThink-designed network which uses Cisco Wi-Fi gear also saw 40,033 unique users — 59 percent of the 67,612 in attendance — a new top percentage total for any single-game network experience we’ve been told about. (The Dallas Cowboys saw approximately 46,700 unique Wi-Fi users during a playoff game last season, about 50 percent of attendance at AT&T Stadium.)

The network also saw a peak concurrent connection of 25,670 users, and a peak data transfer rate of 7.867 Gbps, according to the numbers released by Extreme. Though Extreme gear was not used in the operation of the network, Extreme has a partnership deal with the NFL under which it provides the “official” network analytics reports from the Super Bowl.

The final total of 16.31 TB easily puts Super Bowl 52 ahead of the last two Super Bowls when it comes to Wi-Fi data use. Last year at NRG Stadium in Houston, there was 11.8 TB of Wi-Fi use recorded, and at Super Bowl 50 in 2016 there was 10.1 TB of Wi-Fi data used at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. So in reverse chronological order, the last three Super Bowls are the top three Wi-Fi events, indicating that data demand growth at the NFL’s biggest game shows no sign of slowing down. Combined with the 50.2 TB of cellular data used in and around the stadium on game day, Super Bowl 52 saw a total of 66.51 TB of wireless traffic Sunday in Minneapolis.

Confetti fills the air inside U.S. Bank Stadium after the Philadelphia Eagles defeated the New England Patriots in Super Bowl LII. Credit: U.S. Bank Stadium

Super Bowl 52 represented perhaps a leap of faith, in that the handrail-enclosure Wi-Fi design had not yet seen a stress test like that found at the NFL’s biggest event. Now looking ahead to hosting the 2019 Men’s NCAA Basketball Final Four, David Kingsbury, director of IT for U.S. Bank Stadium, can be forgiven for wanting to take a bit of a victory lap before we set our Wi-Fi sights on Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, home of Super Bowl 53.

“AmpThink, CenturyLink and Cisco designed and built a world-class wireless system for U.S. Bank Stadium that handled record-setting traffic for Super Bowl LII,’ Kingsbury said. “AmpThink president Bill Anderson and his team of amazing engineers were a pleasure to work with and the experts at Cisco Sports and Entertainment supported us throughout the multi-year planning process required for an event of this magnitude. High-density wireless networking is such a challenging issue to manage, but I am very happy with our results and wish the team in Atlanta the best next year. The bar has been raised.”

THE LATEST TOP 10 FOR WI-FI

1. Super Bowl 52, U.S. Bank Stadium, Minneapolis, Minn., Feb. 4, 2018: Wi-Fi: 16.31 TB
2. Super Bowl 51, NRG Stadium, Houston, Feb. 5, 2017: Wi-Fi: 11.8 TB
3. Super Bowl 50, Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, Calif., Feb. 7, 2016: Wi-Fi: 10.1 TB
4. Minnesota Vikings vs. Philadelphia Eagles, NFC Championship Game, Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 21, 2018: Wi-Fi: 8.76 TB
5. Kansas City Chiefs vs. New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Mass., Sept. 7, 2017: Wi-Fi: 8.08 TB
6. Green Bay Packers vs. Dallas Cowboys, Divisional Playoffs, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, Jan. 15, 2017: Wi-Fi: 7.25 TB
7. Southern California vs. Notre Dame, Notre Dame Stadium, South Bend, Ind., Oct. 21, 2017: 7.0 TB
8. WrestleMania 32, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, April 3, 2016: Wi-Fi: 6.77 TB
9. Super Bowl 49, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz., Feb. 1, 2015: Wi-Fi: 6.23 TB
10. Georgia vs. Notre Dame, Notre Dame Stadium, South Bend, Ind., Sept. 9, 2017: Wi-Fi: 6.2 TB

U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis before the start of Super Bowl LII

Eagles see 8.76 TB of Wi-Fi data for NFC Championship game on new Panasonic network

Panasonic Everest Wi-Fi APs (lower left, middle right) mounted underneath an overhang at Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia. Credit: Panasonic (click on any photo for a larger image)

The Philadelphia Eagles saw 8.76 terabytes of Wi-Fi data used at Lincoln Financial Field on Jan. 21 during the Eagles’ 38-7 win over the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC Championship game, a new high in one-day Wi-Fi usage for reported marks in games not called the Super Bowl.

Though the game’s position as No. 3 on our unofficial “top Wi-Fi” list (see below) may change as we get reports from other recent NFL playoff games, the mark is nevertheless impressive, and perhaps a big confirmation metric for Panasonic’s nascent big-venue Wi-Fi business. According to Panasonic, its 654-Access Point network inside “The Linc” also saw 35,760 unique connections during the game, out of 69,596 in attendance; the network also saw a peak of 29,201 concurrent devices connected (which happened during the post-game trophy presentation), and saw peak throughput of 5.5 Gbps.

What’s most interesting about the new Panasonic network in Philadelphia is that it is a completely top-down deployment, meaning that most of the APs (especially the 200 used in the seating bowl) shoot signals down toward seats from above. While most new networks at football-sized stadiums (and some smaller arenas) have turned to under-seat or railing-mounted APs to increase network density in seating areas, Panasonic claims its new “Everest” Wi-Fi gear has antennas that can provide signals up to 165 feet away, with “electronically reconfigurable directional beam profiles” that allow for specific tuning of where the Wi-Fi signal can point to.

By also putting four separate Wi-Fi radios into each access point, Panasonic also claims it can save teams and venues money and time on Wi-Fi deployments, since fewer actual devices are needed. By comparison, other big, new network deployments like Notre Dame’s often have a thousand or more APs; Notre Dame, which uses railing-mounted APs in the seating bowl, has 685 in the seating bowl out of a total 1,096 APs. Many of the Notre Dame APs are Cisco 3800 devices, which have two Wi-Fi radios in each AP.

‘The Linc’ before last week’s NFC Championship game. Credit: Kiel Leggere, Eagles

Atlanta’s new Mercedes-Benz Stadium, which uses Aruba Wi-Fi gear mainly deployed under seats in the bowl, has nearly 1,800 APs, with 1,000 of those in the seating bowl.

Antennas close to fans vs. farther away

From a design and performance standpoint, the under-seat or railing-mounted “proximate” networks are built with many APs close together, with the idea that fans’ bodies will intentionally soak up some of the Wi-Fi signal, a fact that network designers use to their advantage to help eliminate interference between radios. The under-seat AP design, believed to be first widely used by AT&T Park in San Francisco and then at a larger scale at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., was developed to help bring better signals to seats where overhang-mounted APs couldn’t deliver strong connectivity. Older concrete-bowl stadiums like Notre Dame’s also went with a proximate railing design for a similar lack of overhangs.

Though the Eagles’ IT team has repeatedly turned down interview requests from MSR since this summer, Danny Abelson, vice president connectivity for Panasonic Enterprise Solution Company, met with MSR last week to provide details of the deployment. Citing new, patented antenna technology developed specifically by Panasonic to solve the limitations of prior overhead gear, Abelson claims Panasonic can deliver a similar stadium experience for “two-thirds the cost” of an under-seat or railing-mount network design, with savings realized both in construction costs (since it is usually cheaper to install overhead-mounted equipment than under-seat or railing mounts due to drilling needed) and in the need for fewer actual APs, since Panasonic has four radios in its main Wi-Fi APs.

Eagles fans cheering their team to the Super Bowl. Credit: Hunter Martin, Eagles

Abelson, however, declined to provide the exact cost of the Panasonic network at Lincoln Financial Field, citing non-disclosure agreements. There are also more questions to be answered about a Panasonic deployment’s cost, including charges for management software and/or administration services. Currently, Abelson said, Panasonic includes the costs for management software and management personnel in its bids.

When it comes to how the Eagles found Panasonic, the team and the company already had an existing relationship, as Panasonic’s video-board division had previously supplied displays for the Linc. According to Abelson, Panasonic went through a performance test at several Eagles games last season, bringing in Wi-Fi gear to see if the new technology could provide coverage to areas where the Eagles said they had seen lower-quality coverage before. One of the forerunners in the NFL in bringing Wi-Fi to fans, the Eagles had previously used Extreme Networks Wi-Fi gear to build a fan-facing network in 2013. Though the Eagles would not comment about the selection process, after issuing an RFP this past offseason the team chose Panasonic for a new network, which Abelson said was deployed in three months during the football offseason.

Re-opening the debate for antenna placement?

Though Mobile Sports Report has not yet been able to get to Philadelphia to test the new network in a live game-day situation, if Panasonic’s new gear works as promises the company may find many potential interested customers, especially those who had shied away from deploying under-seat networks due to the construction issues or costs.

The Panasonic system may be of particular interest to indoor arenas, like hockey and basketball stadiums, where the gear could be potentially mounted in catwalk areas to cover seating. John Spade, CTO for the NHL’s Florida Panthers and BB&T Center in Sunrise, Fla., has tweeted favorably about a Panasonic deployment going in at the arena whose networks he oversees:

But even as the impressive 8.76 TB mark seen at the NFC Championship game now sits as the third-highest reported Wi-Fi data use event we’ve heard of (behind only the 10.1 TB of Wi-Fi seen at Super Bowl 50 and the 11.8 TB seen at Super Bowl 51), that number may fall a bit down the list if we ever get verified numbers for some network totals we’ve heard rumors about lately. (Or even any older ones! C’mon network teams: Check out the list below and let us know if we’ve missed any.)

So far this season, we haven’t gotten any reports of Wi-Fi usage out of the network team at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium (which recently hosted the college football playoff championship game), and we’ve only heard general talk about oversized playoff-game traffic at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis, home of Sunday’s Super Bowl 52. Like Notre Dame Stadium, U.S. Bank Stadium uses a mostly railing-mounted AP deployment in its seating bowl; both networks were designed by AmpThink. We are also still waiting for reports from last week’s AFC Championship game at Gillette Stadium, where the previous non-Super Bowl top mark of 8.08 TB was set in September; and from any games this fall at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where the NFL’s biggest stadium has 2,567 Wi-Fi APs.

Will overhead still be able to keep up as demand for more bandwidth keeps growing? Will Panasonic’s claims of lower costs for equal performance hold up? At the very least, the performance in Philadelphia could re-open debate about whether or not you need to deploy APs closer to fans to provide a good Wi-Fi experience. If all goes well, the winners in renewed competition will be venues, teams, and ultimately, fans.

THE LATEST TOP 10 FOR WI-FI

1. Super Bowl 51, NRG Stadium, Houston, Feb. 5, 2017: Wi-Fi: 11.8 TB
2. Super Bowl 50, Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, Calif., Feb. 7, 2016: Wi-Fi: 10.1 TB
3. Minnesota Vikings vs. Philadelphia Eagles, NFC Championship Game, Lincoln Financial Field, Philadelphia, Pa., Jan. 21, 2018: Wi-Fi: 8.76 TB
4. Kansas City Chiefs vs. New England Patriots, Gillette Stadium, Foxborough, Mass., Sept. 7, 2017: Wi-Fi: 8.08 TB
5. Green Bay Packers vs. Dallas Cowboys, Divisional Playoffs, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, Jan. 15, 2017: Wi-Fi: 7.25 TB
6. Southern California vs. Notre Dame, Notre Dame Stadium, South Bend, Ind., Oct. 21, 2017: 7.0 TB
7. WrestleMania 32, AT&T Stadium, Arlington, Texas, April 3, 2016: Wi-Fi: 6.77 TB
8. Super Bowl 49, University of Phoenix Stadium, Glendale, Ariz., Feb. 1, 2015: Wi-Fi: 6.23 TB
9. Georgia vs. Notre Dame, Notre Dame Stadium, South Bend, Ind., Sept. 9, 2017: Wi-Fi: 6.2 TB
10. Alabama vs. Texas A&M, Kyle Field, College Station, Texas, Oct. 17, 2015: Wi-Fi: 5.7 TB

‘Fan Mobile Pass’ will serve as NFL’s Super Bowl 52 app, from pregame activities to game day functions

For the second year in a row, the NFL is building its own mobile app for the Super Bowl, this time with a single-application strategy meant to cover both fan activities the week before Super Bowl LII, as well as game-day functionality at U.S. Bank Stadium in Minneapolis.

In a phone interview Thursday with Aaron Amendolia, vice president of IT services for the NFL’s office of the CIO, Amendolia said the new strategy of having a single app for pre-game and game-day activity was meant to drive adoption and eliminate confusion over which app fans might need for various Super Bowl interactions. Last year, the NFL tried to harmonize its Super Bowl app strategy but still required fans to use a separate app — the NFL Mobile app — to see game highlights and other content.

The Super Bowl LII app is now available for download, and fans can sign up on the Super Bowl app website for a chance to win tickets to the big game, while also providing personal information that Amendolia said will assist with the league’s quest to bring more “personalization” to the experience.

“There’s more gamification to the app, with the opportunity for fans to win achievements” through the week, Amendolia said. According to the sign-up web page, there will be a heavy focus on social media engagement, with promises of availability of free autographs from current and past NFL stars; the ability to take a picture of the Super Bowl trophy; and to see images of all 51 Super Bowl rings. There will also be sponsor-activation activities throughout Minneapolis, most likely at the NFL Super Bowl Live fan site on Nicollet Mall and other Super Bowl events, where presumably fans can “check in” with the app’s QR code to earn rewards.

Wayfinding maps, but no blue dots

For both the week before and game day, Amendolia said the app will have wayfinding maps, but they won’t be active “blue dot” wayfinding, even though that feature is supported in the Vikings’ own stadium app, which was developed for the Vikings by app developer VenueNext.

“We did discuss [beacon-enabled] options, but there are some challenges to that that are unique to the Super Bowl,” said Amendolia, noting things like temporary structures and closed roads for Super Bowl activities that could be harder to integrate into maps. For wayfinding beyond maps, Amendolia said there would be a heavy reliance on digital signage information in and around the stadium to help fans find their way.

Like last year, the NFL Super Bowl app will not have any functionality allowing fans to order food or drinks for delivery or express pickup, with the latter being a service that was tested at Vikings home games this season. The app will allow fans to pre-order merchandise and pick it up at locations around town during the week before the game, Amendolia said, and will also allow suite ticketholders to order merchandise for pickup during the game.

One interesting question is whether or not the Vikings will be allowed to make their own app active for the game if they make the Super Bowl by beating the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC championship this weekend. If so, it would represent the first time an NFL team played in the Super Bowl at its home stadium, an issue never faced in the era of team apps. Vikings officials did not respond yet to questions about the possible availability of the team app for the Super Bowl, but we will update this post if and when they do.

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