Wireless traffic jam at the Big Game?
AT&T does lots to get fans and their phones ready for football
by Derek Handova
Everyone in the San Francisco Bay Area has been anticipating the arrival of the Big Game of professional football with a combination of exhilaration and dread for months. And, finally, the big day has arrived…almost. In addition to the tieups on the roads and freeways around San Francisco and the actual location of the Big Game — 40 miles to the south — in Santa Clara, Calif., the mobile phone networks around the site of the game and in Big Game City have been under pressure, which will peak with the playing of the game.
However, one of the mobile carriers, AT&T, has taken great steps to make sure that all those football fans native to the Bay Area and the others from afar can use their mobile phones and tablets to get online to tweet, post YouTube videos and cheer or jeer on Facebook in real time. AT&T has made many upgrades for the Big Game at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, according to one of its spokespeople.
The way Sinan Akkaya, AT&T director of RAN engineering for Northern California, states it, 150 percent more wireless capacity exists now at the ballpark compared to the prior year. To enable all this capacity, the carrier changed its design from 60 zones to 36 zones.
To accomplish that an antenna swap out took place in order to implement a narrow beamwidth configuration. Plus, AT&T had to change its spectrum structure. Previously, it had 20 MHz of 4G capacity and 20 MHz of 3G capacity. For the Big Game, it switched the airwaves to have 35 MHz of 4G and only 10 MHz of 3G, essentially recovering spectrum from its 3G systems and giving it to the 4G network.
With all these adjustments, AT&T should have enough resources to handle the total wireless throughput expected during the duration of the Big Game of up to 2 terabytes. And with the addition of Cellsites-on-Wheels (COWs) outside the stadium and in the general area, AT&T can handle up to 6 to 7 terabytes of wireless traffic, according to Akkaya.
After the traffic is received at the AT&T macro cell sites, COWs and other wireless aggregators, it is backhauled onto a recently installed redundant fiber loop. This loop accompanies an existing fiber loop that AT&T already had at Levi’s Stadium, according to Akkaya. This loop will stay installed permanently, with no plans to decommission it after the Big Game, according to Akkaya. It will be used to take traffic from the six macro cell sites the mobile carrier now has in the vicinity of Levi’s Stadium.
Besides the improvements to telecommunications made by AT&T at Levi’s Stadium, the mobile carrier has installed 26 distributed antenna systems (DAS) around the San Francisco Bay Area to improve wireless access at strategically important places such as Moscone Center, big convention hotels and other places.
Overall, AT&T has spent $100 million to improve its network in the Bay Area, with $25 million of that directly impacting the Big Game site at Levi’s Stadium. So no matter who wins the Big Game, the fans come out on top!
