As Opening Days occur all around the U.S., baseball fans, particularly those in St. Louis, will be experiencing better wireless coverage at the Cardinal’s season opener this year. AT&T increased wireless capacity by 60 percent at the baseball club’s Busch Stadium. OzarksFirst.com reported significant changes in the wireless coverage since Opening Day one year ago. John Sondag with AT&T Missouri says the improvements to the stadium’s network will shorten the distance data will travel, making data transfers faster as games are played.
Sondag explained the demand for more capacity has increased drastically in Missouri over the past year. All of the state’s major sports clubs have increased wireless infrastructure in their stadiums to cope with demand. Last year, 925 gigabytes of mobile data were consumed at Busch Stadium on AT&T’s wireless network. Sondag says that is the equivalent of 2.6 million selfies. “We’ve spent about $1.6 billion over the last three years in our networks in Missouri just trying to keep up with this demand,” he said.
A key feature of the new antennas at Busch Stadium is that they will only handle traffic while games are in progress. They were designed only to handle the data traffic of the three million people expected to attend games this season, and do not affect AT&T’s network outside the stadium.
(Don’t forget to check out our friends at Mobile Sports Report and download their Spring 2017 Stadium Tech Report)
April 4, 2017
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