Why it matters to you
Super Bowl 51 will draw tens of thousands of fans to Houston in early February, and mobile carriers are making sure they’re prepared to handle the onslaught.
The Super Bowl: A time-honored tradition in the United States in which two football teams face off in a nail-biting fight for the championship. More than 117 million are expected to tune into this year’s festivities, and TV networks are prepping for the coming onslaught. But those in attendance pose a bigger infrastructure challenge — especially when it comes to wireless service. At last year’s Super Bowl 50 in Santa Clara, California, the big game’s 71,088 attendees downloaded nearly 16 terabytes of data across all major networks.
It’s no surprise, then, that carriers are taking steps to beef up wireless coverage in and around the Houston, Texas NRG Stadium well ahead of time. T-Mobile, Sprint, Verizon, and AT&T are leading the charge.
T-Mobile
T-Mobile has been laying the necessary groundwork for the past year. On Thursday, the carrier announced that it has permanently increased 4G LTE capacity nearly 20 times around NRG Stadium, and by more than 10 times at nearby airports, venues, and hotels, including George Bush Intercontinental Airport, Houston Hobby Airport, Discovery Green, Minute Maid Park, Toyota Center, Rice Stadium, and George R. Brown Convention Center. T-Mobile says that overall, the greater Houston area now has 5 times more capacity than before.
That’s not all the self-styled Un-carrier’s done. It’s beefed up the area’s LTE spectrum with Extended Range LTE, a type of signal that travels twice as far from T-Mobile’s towers and is four times better in buildings. It rolled out carrier aggregation, a feature which combines multiple LTE signals to supercharge connectivity. It deployed new antennas in “trouble spots” — specifically, inside buildings and in “spots where regular towers don’t reach as well.” And it installed antennas in Houston’s underground tunnel system.