As of 2014, 934 stadiums worldwide have 30,000 or more seats: 228 in North America; 129 in Central and South America; 243 in Europe; 98 in Middle East and Africa; and 236 in the APAC region. The USA alone has 217 stadiums with 30,000 seats or more, and about two thirds of these are used primarily for American Football.
While RF coverage at open air stadiums may be provided by surrounding macro networks, such densely populated venues require exceptional signal quality and enormous capacity to support 4G data usage. These requirements are best fulfilled by building a wireless network inside the stadium, with its own cluster of NodeBs /Base Station sectors.
Designing an in-building wireless network for stadiums presents a unique set of challenges, such as:
As you know, it’s extremely challenging to provide a completely connected experience for thousands of fans packed into a stadium. So you can imagine the effort it took to upgrade the University of Phoenix stadium for this year’s Big Game. But 12.79TB* of data later, we know it was a record breaking success.
We hosted a webinar on this project this month and invited AT&T, Sprint, Crown Castle, and ExteNet Systems to find out how they teamed up to tackle the massive data demands of the 2015 Big Game, and what they see as the future for networks.
Chris Hourigan from Crown Castle was our first speaker. He talked about how his company was tasked with installing new networks for the University of Phoenix Stadium and many of the surrounding venues. The stadium, for example had 228 antennas and 150,000 linear feet of cabling for its wireless network. They also had 28 staff members on-site during the Big Game, ready for anything.
Here’s a snapshot of what Crown Castle did.
Next up was Tormod Larsen of ExteNet who went over the indoor networks that they designed and built for the Big Game. These mostly consisted of key hotels for the players, VIP’s and hundreds of other employees and stakeholders for the Big Game. He reported that approximately two thirds of the data traffic during the Big Game took place outside of the stadium.
He also provided a humourous take on what was going through everyone’s mind during the Big Game, including Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman.
Our final presenter was Jim Parker from AT&T who reported some impressive AT&T Big Game stats, which stimulated a great panel discussion.
Our three presenters left us with much to discuss and a lot of questions from the audience. Luckily, we had reserved half of the hour session for a panel discussion, moderated by iBwave’s Dominique Gauthier. Also joining us for the panel portion was Richard Barth from Sprint.
Here are some of the questions that were discussed.
How do you go about dimensioning such a DAS?
Biggest challenges & lessons learned?
Who ultimately funded the system?
How do you satisfy each operator’s requirements?
How do you see the network evolving in the next five years?
You can view a recording of the webinar with full presentations from all three speakers as well as each panelist’s take on the questions above.
By Vladan Jevremovic, PhD – Research Director at iBwave
With the emergence of 4G wireless technology, today’s consumers have come to expect fast and pervasive internet access while on the go, in the same way that they would experience it at home or at the office.
Wireless carriers increasingly understand how the user’s experience is affected by their ability to access the network in public venues.
This is particularly true as heavy internet users tend to engage in web surfing or downloading activities when idle, or when using public transport for their daily commute, waiting at the airport, strolling in the shopping mall or during halftime at the stadium.
As a result, most funding for indoor wireless networks is now allocated to venues with the highest subscriber density, such as:
Airports
Stadiums and arenas
Underground public transportation (subways)
Shopping malls
While the network design and implementation requirements can vary widely depending on the environment, there are also many commonalities.
In this white paper published by Vladan Jevremovic, we will discuss the typical indoor wireless systems, RF design challenges and best practices for public venues, while taking into account 4G network performance requirements.
