Reports: Free Wi-Fi now available at Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium for World Series

Screen Shot 2014-10-22 at 2.38.07 PMAccording to reports from Kansas City, the previously Wi-Fi-less Kauffman Stadium now has a working free Wi-Fi network for fans, apparently installed recently by Major League Baseball’s advanced media group. Though we haven’t yet received any official confirmation about the network’s launch from either the Royals organization or from MLBAM, two separate sources confirmed that free Wi-Fi is available in the stadium, and apparently has been for a few weeks now.

In our reporting about MLB Wi-Fi deployments for our Q2 Stadium Tech Report, we found that Kauffman Stadium was one of 10 MLB parks not yet offering Wi-Fi for fans in the seats. But since this spring MLBAM has publicly said that it plans to help install Wi-Fi in the remaining parks that need it, including helping to pay for the deployment if necessary. One possible reason for the speedy deployment at Kauffman could be the joint marketing deal between Apple, MasterCard and MLBAM to promote the use of the new Apple Pay service, which is being offered at both Kauffman Stadium and AT&T Park during the World Series. San Francisco’s AT&T Park already has Wi-Fi, a service the Giants have offered fans since 2004.

Though a thorough search of the Kansas City Royals’ team website shows no mention of Wi-Fi services available at Kauffman stadium, one Twitter user has reported finding a free “speedy” Wi-Fi service at recent playoff games there, and another visitor to the park for yesterday’s World Series opener also reported a live Wi-Fi service available to fans. Another tipster has told us that the network uses Cisco Wi-Fi gear, but again, nothing has yet been officially confirmed.

Anyone lucky enough to have a ticket to tonight’s Game 2, send us a Wi-Fi speedtest if you can…

Giants: NLCS stadium Wi-Fi usage at AT&T Park quadrupled since 2012

Giants senior VP and CIO Bill Schlough, at the office

Giants senior VP and CIO Bill Schlough, at the office

If you build a better stadium network, they will come… and use it even more. That’s what the San Francisco Giants are finding out, with stadium Wi-Fi data usage more than quadrupling this year compared to the last time the Giants were in the NLCS in 2012.

According to Bill Schlough, senior vice president and CIO for the Giants, fans at AT&T Park for the recent National League championship series with the St. Louis Cardinals used more than four times the Wi-Fi data that fans used in the 2012 series. Schlough said that in 2012 (also facing the Cardinals) fans at the four AT&T Park NLCS games used an average of 302 Gigabytes per game; this year, in the three games in San Francisco, that number was 1,247 GB per game.

Screen Shot 2014-10-20 at 9.26.21 PM

What makes the jump in data even more interesting is the fact that the number of overall users of the Wi-Fi network only increased about 19 percent from 2012 to 2014, with an average of 16,683 users on the network this year compared to 13,509 in 2012, according to figures from Schlough and the Giants. “It definitely shows how data per connection is what is really exploding,” said Schlough in an email.

Looking back another couple years is also instructive; in 2010, during the NLCS the AT&T Park network only saw an average of 6,511 fans using Wi-Fi per game. (The team did not track data usage at that time.) Though the World Series starts today in Kansas City, fans will have to wait until Game 3 in San Francisco Friday to use Wi-Fi since the Royals’ Kaufmann Stadium is one of the 10 MLB parks that don’t have fan-facing Wi-Fi.

White box at bottom is one of the under-the-seat Wi-Fi access points at AT&T Park.

White box at bottom is one of the under-the-seat Wi-Fi access points at AT&T Park.

MLB delivers daily fantasy game in partnership with DraftKings

draft

In the past Major League Baseball once denounced daily fantasy baseball games as gambling, implying that no skill was involved, but that has changed as baseball has teamed with fantasy sports contest provider DraftKings for an offering that launches with the upcoming season.

The Official Mini Fantasy Game of MLB.com is a free one-day fantasy league that can be entered daily and offers fans the ability to win tickets to regular season games, the 2014 All-Star Game and a 2014 World Series game. There are a total of four grand prizes, two each to the All-Star and World Series as well as a number of other prizes.

Players get a $50,000 salary cap and then select from a field of players that has 10 position players who can accumulate points (or lose them) by accomplishing select actions such as +5 points for a stolen base and +2 points for each strike out a pitcher earns. There will be several different offerings including a daily MLB.com Official Fantasy Contest and a weekly MLB.com Friday Home Team contest among others.

DraftKings specializes in creating what it calls daily leagues, ones that you can play and then quit, none of this following a fantasy baseball team for a season trying to convince a fellow owner to trade his star starting pitcher for your broken down LOOGY.

Its system is simple and has the potential to be lucrative for users. It has both free and paid contests in which participants select individuals to make up a team, watch how they perform that day and if they perform the best you can win cash. DraftKings is currently running several contests including a March Madness one. It offers contests in five major sports: MLB, NHL, NFL, NBA and the PGA. It offers a wide variety of contests from head-to-head to qualifiers.

This will be interesting to see how this pans out on many levels. Lotteries have tried to have sports offerings and most of the major league teams have fought against them. States, led by New Jersey, have then fought back, so far unsuccessfully. Now a league is endorsing it as a skill event and that could lead to an easing of other leagues’ dislike of this type of activity.

AT&T Bosox fans set wireless data records during World Series opener

It’s a bit of a broken record — another big sporting event, another huge wireless data usage event — but the numbers never fail to amaze me: According to our friends at AT&T, fans at Fenway Park Wednesday night set new records for wireless data usage during the Red Sox victory over the St. Louis Cardinals in the opening game of the 2013 World Series. How much data? Try 248 GB of data, bigger even than the Bosox’s Big Papi.

Mind you, none of these figures represent traffic that might have traversed over the Meru-supplied Wi-Fi network inside Fenway. The following figures are all from AT&T’s Distributed Antenna System (DAS) network, the collection of small cellular antennas that bring better connectivity to crowded public places. And this is only AT&T carried data, which means that the total of all wireless customers in the park is almost certainly a multiple larger. But for your enjoyment here are the AT&T stats, direct from our AT&T sources:

— Data usage on the AT&T in-stadium network during Game 1 was 248 GB (gigabytes) of data
— 248 GB of data is equal to more than 700,000 social media posts with photos
— AT&T fans made more than 17,361 voice calls and sent more than 56,335 SMS text messages Wednesday night on our in-stadium network
— The peak hour for data traffic on the in-stadium network was from 10–11 p.m. EST
— The 248 GB total surpassed the record for data usage for the AT&T in-stadium network at Busch Stadium in St. Louis in 2013, which was 183 GB set on 10/11/13

We’ll see if the Meru folks can provide any Wi-Fi stats before the series ends. Like football, baseball is perfect for data dalliances because of all the downtime between action. Just more proof that this mobile sports thing is more than just a fad.

Giants Fans at AT&T Park Sent Lots of Texts During World Series, But Also Watched the Game

Our friends over at AT&T sent us some interesting wireless network stats from last week’s first two games of this year’s World Series, which were played in the San Francisco Giants’ well-wired home, AT&T Park. With the stadium’s state-of-the-art wireless infrastructure, it’s perhaps no surprise that fans consumed multiple gigabits of data, both sending and receiving.

We’ll include all the raw stats below — including some fun ones like the 53,000 SMS text messsages sent in the 6 p.m. hour of Game 1, the time span during which eventual Series MVP Pablo Sandoval hit his second and third home runs of the game — but what jumped out at us was the fact that voice calls peaked before the games started and data traffic peaked within the first hour. To us, that meant what happened was what we’ve believed all along: That fans do like to send a picture or a photo of themselves at big games, or call friends who aren’t there, but then once the games start they’re watching what’s happening on the field.

So even in Tweet-happy and iPhone-crazy San Francisco, the great fears of fans only looking at their phones and forgetting to cheer isn’t something that’s going to happen anytime soon. If nothing else, the players on the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals can tell you that fans at AT&T Park were certainly paying attention and directing all their attention to the field, quite loudly at times. It might be some time before others believe cell phones and sporting events can co-exist, but we’re here to tell you it’s already happening now.

(Stats and figures below courtesy of AT&T, describing the stats their network folks compiled based on fans’ usage of our network during Games 1 and 2 of the World Series at AT&T Park in San Francisco.)

2012 World Series – games 1 & 2

· Fans still love the long ball – More than 15 percent more data was uploaded and nearly 20,000 more texts were shared on our network inside the park (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) during game one than game two of the 2012 World Series at AT&T Park.

· A text speaks 1,000 words – AT&T mobile users sent and received more than 350,000 texts across our network during the first two games of the World Series (between the hours of 4-9pm PST).

· Hush up, the game’s about to start – For both of the first two games of the 2012 World Series at AT&T Park (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) the most calls made on AT&T’s Network occurred during the hour directly preceding the game’s first pitch (4-5 pm PST).

· Fastest fingers – The hourly data upload and hourly total data peaks occurred in the first hour (5-6 pm PST) of both game one and two (between the hours of 4-9pm PST). Data uploaded as well as total data volumes decreased during each hour the game went on (between the hours of 4-9pm PST).

Additional Data

Game 1

· The hourly data upload peak of 16.2 GB (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) occurred in the hour in which Pablo Sandoval hit his first home run

· The peak point in hourly total data consumption (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) happened in the first hour of the game with a total volume of 35.3 GB passing through AT&T’s Network.

· AT&T subscribers downloaded the most data – 18.3 GB – during the 6 pm hour (between the hours of 4-9pm PST)

· AT&T mobile users sent and received the most texts (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) during the 6pm hour, the hour in which Pablo Sandoval hit his second and then his historic third home run, with more than 53,000 SMS texts sent and delivered across AT&T’s Network. That’s more than one text for every fan in the stadium. (Total attendance – 42,855)

· For the opening game of the 2012 World Series at AT&T Park (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) the most calls made on AT&T’s Network occurred during the hour directly preceding the game’s first pitch.

Game 2

· The hourly data upload peak of 13.8 GB (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) occurred in the hour in which the first pitch was thrown

· The peak point in hourly total data consumption (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) happened in the first hour of the game with a total volume of 33.1 GB passing through AT&T’s Network.

· AT&T subscribers downloaded the most data – 20.6 GB – during the 6 pm hour (between the hours of 4-9pm PST)

· AT&T mobile users sent and received the most texts (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) during the 7pm hour with more than 42,000 SMS texts sent and delivered across AT&T’s Network. That’s nearly one text for every fan in the stadium. (Total attendance – 42,982)

· For the second game of the 2012 World Series at AT&T Park (between the hours of 4-9pm PST) the most calls made on AT&T’s Network occurred during the hour directly preceding the game’s first pitch.

Giants Win, Twitter Explodes

It’s become pretty normal for Twitter to blow up after any big event now (just wait until the U.S. Presidential elections) but when the company’s hometown baseball team wins the World Series, the explosion of tweets is the Internet equivalent of the fireworks going off around us here in the Bay Area tonight. According to Topsy, the tweets hit 38,000 per minute right after Sergio Romo got Miguel Cabrera to watch strike three on that sick fastball:

38,000+ tweets per minute for the @ after winning the #worldseries! Go Giants! #sfgiants http://t.co/rK1bocEK

@Topsy

Topsy

In honor of the Giants and for Twitter, some choice post-game missives from the folks we follow. Any good ones you’ve seen, put them in the comments and I’ll add them later to the main post.

Second time today Romo’s clinched a game for the Giants.

@jimrome

Jim Rome

When a #WorldSeries is won on the road…almost as awkward as that Erin Andrews interview of Marco Scutaro.

@Matt_Ginella

Matt Ginella

my neighborhood is one #SFGiants party spot. Honking has begun in earnest.

@om

Om Malik

RT @: Dear God. Giants championship parade scheduled for Halloween. That is going to be a FREAKSHOW.

@jason_kint

Jason Kint

p.s. Thank you Melky for the All-Star victory 😉

@omid

Omid Ashtari

Giants win with pitching, defense..managers moves..timely hitting..sounds like simple formula..if it were everyone would do it..congrats SF

@karlravechespn

karl ravech

https://twitter.com/evanadrian/status/262764923556352002/photo/1

Across the street from me, how to watch the game in The City. (Also, faster than Twitter for news.) http://t.co/KB2TRbD9

@Rafe

Rafe Needleman

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