All throughout the United States, preparations are beginning to ramp up for perhaps the single biggest event of the year, the Super Bowl. Liquor stores and wing joints are stocking up, hours of pre-game coverage has already begun, and bets are pouring in to casinos in Vegas.
Mobile providers are no different. With the proliferation of social media allowing anyone to post their own instant reactions to live events (and see posts from others), the amount of cellular data that is used during the Super Bowl represents a dramatic spike from general day to day use. This is especially true in Santa Clara, the host city for this year’s big game, which, come Sunday, will be flooded with hordes of football fans and socializes alike.
As such, mobile providers have seen the need to provide greater capacity for service in this area. Verizon (News - Alert), for example, has built a fleet of 15 additional cell towers in the San Francisco Bay area, as well as installing around 75 smaller cellular transmitters around the city. AT&T has made similar improvements, investing about 100 million dollars in infrastructure improvements in the Bay Area, and T-Mobile (News - Alert) has also made efforts to upgrade their cellular network in California.
In addition to preexisting improvements, all of these wireless networks will also contain a “war room” where technicians can monitor their networks in real time. This allows them to see where the network is being overused and allow them to make on the spot improvements. “On game day, when most people are sitting on a couch, or the lucky ones are in the stadium, we are going to have folks in the bowels of the stadium,” said AT&T (News - Alert) assistant VP John Cooke, who oversees the company’s network engineering for the San Francisco Bay Area. This will ensure that people in and around the stadium do not see any service interruptions.
The Super Bowl is the biggest live event of the year, making it an especially popular day for Twitter (News - Alert), SnapChat, and other social media services. Mobile providers will be working around the clock to make sure things go off without a hitch.