During a game that lived up to all the hype, Verizon (NYSE: VZ) said its network rose to the occasion, handling 52.34 TB of data in and around Allegiant Stadium for Super Bowl LVIII. This year’s data was up 9.4 percent compared with the 47.8 TB used at Super Bowl LVII in 2023.
More than half of the 61,629 attendees at the game used Verizon’s network, plus countless fans outside the stadium. Even with the heavy usage, the peak download speed was 4.4 Gbps, and the upload speed peaked at 671 Mbps, according to the carrier. The median download speed was 2.7 Gbps, and the median upload speed was 138 Mbps. Use of Verizon’s 5G UltraWideband network grew to 70 percent of customers, up from 63 percent last year.
Verizon worked to ensure the network’s performance during a game that went into a rarely seen overtime. A team of 65 engineers staffed Verizon’s two remote Network Command Centers 24×7 and an additional 23 engineers were testing the network in and around the stadium.
Verizon spent more than two years preparing for Super Bowl LVIII, deploying 250 5G mmWave radios. With C-band technology, fans were able to use a full 160 MHz of spectrum, nearly tripling the 5G bandwidth from last year’s Super Bowl. More than 547 miles of fiber were deployed across the city, lighting up C-band spectrum across 52 million square feet in and around casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.
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