Mobile performance at the ballpark: A RootMetrics review of network performance at US baseball stadiums

10-21-15 | Dave Andersen

Introduction

Millions of baseball fans grab their gloves and head to the stadium to watch a game every year. But whether you’re a big-time baseball fan who can rattle off arcane statistics or someone who takes in a game only once or twice a year, you’ve probably had better experiences in some stadiums than in others. Good baseball venues share a few obvious characteristics, from majestic views to great choices for food to shops where you can buy your favorite player’s jersey. But there’s another, often overlooked trait that good stadiums have in common: strong and reliable data performance from mobile networks.

After all, baseball stadiums aren’t just a place to catch the action in person; they also act as hubs for mobile network activity. When you’re at a game, you might want to check the scores of other games with your phone, manage your fantasy baseball team, or upload a picture of your favorite player to social media. Given the importance of your smartphone at the ballpark, lagging data performance from your mobile network can act as a significant pain point. Venues, however, can be incredibly complex areas for networks to cover. Congestion from crowds, dense construction materials, and even location within the stadium can impact your mobile experience.

To show you which networks and US stadiums offer an MVP mobile experience, we tested mobile network data performance at 29 Major League Baseball stadiums across the US. Our opening section offers an overview of network performance information for nine stadiums in the US that are home to teams in the postseason. These are the venues where attendance is often at or near capacity all season long. As a result, network demands are likely quite high during the entire season and performance differences are magnified. We’ve also ranked all 29 stadiums from highest to lowest for overall network data performance to show you where performance is a grand slam, and where your data experience might hit below the Mendoza Line.

Venues can be incredibly complex areas for networks to cover. Congestion from crowds, dense construction materials, and even location within the stadium can impact your mobile experience.

How we test

To evaluate how well each network handles typical consumer data demands, we use off-the-shelf smartphones to test network data performance under typical conditions at densely populated event venues across the US, with each venue tested at least once per year. Testing is conducted during the entirety of each event; samples are collected both while seated and while walking along concourses, near concession areas, and other publicly available areas. In addition to capturing download and upload speed, we test each network’s data performance during consumer-based activities such as checking email or during web/app usage. The top-performing data network(s) at each venue earns our RootScore Award as a mark of excellence in our consumer-focused testing.





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Performance at postseason venues

The goal of every baseball team is to play meaningful games in October. Every player on every team wants to compete with the best teams in baseball during the postseason, and ultimately win the World Series. What does this have to do with your mobile experience?

Stadiums that are home to teams in the playoffs are generally among the most heavily attended venues in all of baseball. Tens of thousands of fans are constantly walking on concourses and moving to and from their seats as their favorite teams compete on the field. The architecture at many of these stadiums can be quite complex, with multiple levels and a wide variety of construction materials. In short, these postseason stadiums are competitive battlegrounds for the carriers and intense pressure spots for providing consumers with consistent network coverage.

To show you at-a-glance performance information and to highlight the variability in performance often found at venues, we’ve looked at mobile performance results from our testing at the nine US baseball venues home to teams that made the postseason in 2015: Busch Stadium (St. Louis, MO); Citi Field (New York, NY); Dodger Stadium (Los Angeles, CA); Globe Life Park in Arlington (Arlington, TX); Kauffman Stadium (Kansas City, MO); Minute Maid Park (Houston, TX); PNC Park (Pittsburgh, PA); Wrigley Field (Chicago, IL); and Yankee Stadium (Bronx, NY).

Five of the nine postseason stadiums were among the top-10 in total attendance during the 2015 regular season, according to ESPN, and eight of the nine venues ranked top-16 for total attendance. All told, these nine stadiums hosted over 23 million total fans during the season, and some, like Dodger Stadium, attracted over 46,000 fans per game. These heavily populated postseason venues can present myriad coverage challenges for the carriers.

Whether you're looking to download your e-ticket at the gate, check email, view Twitter, or check baseball stats, your data experience at the stadium is dependent upon the speed and reliability of your network connection. Our speed testing looks at the median download and upload speeds for each carrier’s network at these venues. Our reliability testing, meanwhile, considers the two hallmarks of your network experience: can you connect to the data network, and can you then stay connected until your task is complete (i.e., did you experience a data failure)?

For this report, we focus on reliability success rates for getting connected and staying connected during our web/app testing, which serves as a good proxy for overall data reliability. We use a high bar in our data reliability testing and look for carriers to offer at least a 97% success rate in our web/app testing. This 97% threshold reflects performance that would pose little to no noticeable disruptions in your everyday mobile life. To give an easy, at-a-glance look at reliability, we’ve marked web/app performance above 97% as “Excellent.”

Check out the chart below for a look at performance across the nine US playoff stadiums, where competition among the networks is as fierce as it is on the field.

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Among the playoff venues we tested, the highest-ranking stadium was PNC Park in Pittsburgh, which ranked 6th out of 29 in our overall composite score. Reliability was strong at PNC Park, with Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon all scoring Excellent for getting connected, while all four carriers scored Excellent for staying connected. AT&T’s success rate of 94.1% for getting connected was also quite strong. Speeds were also good at PNC Park; Verizon offered the fastest median download speed at 13.1 Mbps, while AT&T recorded the fastest median upload speed at 11.3 Mbps. AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon all offered both median download and upload speeds of at least 4.1 Mbps. If you attended a game at PNC Park, odds are your data experience was a smooth one.



Results at Kauffman Stadium, ranked 29th in our overall composite scoring, told a different story from what we found at PNC Park and showed just how variable performance at venues can be. As you might expect based on the stadium’s last place rank, the speeds we found at Kauffman Stadium were comparatively slow and reliability for most networks was somewhat poor. AT&T and T-Mobile recorded median download speeds below 0.2 Mbps, while AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon each recorded median upload speeds below 1.6 Mbps. The results weren’t all poor, however. Sprint offered the second-fastest median download speed among all nine playoff venues at 14.6 Mbps, and Sprint and Verizon scored Excellent for both getting connected and staying connected.

Ranking the stadiums

To give you a comparative view of how performance differs depending on which stadium you attend, we’ve ranked all 29 US Major League Baseball venues from highest to lowest for overall data network coverage. Our venue rankings are based on an average of all networks’ RootScores at a particular venue, weighted by the estimated national percentage of subscribers for each network. In other words, performance scores from networks that have more customers are weighted heavier than scores from networks with fewer subscribers.

As you might expect based on our earlier sections, there’s certainly no guarantee of great mobile performance at the ballpark. One way to show the variable performances we found across US baseball stadiums is to look at results from stadiums located within the same metro area.

Consider, for example, that the fastest median download speed we found at Citi Field in the New York metro area was Verizon’s 2.6 Mbps. AT&T and Sprint, meanwhile, each recorded median download speeds below 1.0 Mbps. However, speeds at Yankee Stadium in New York were a different story: Verizon’s median download speed of 16.7 Mbps was the fastest among all networks at this venue, and Sprint, at 0.3 Mbps, was the only network to record a median download speed below 2.5 Mbps.

In the San Francisco metro area, we found a sharp contrast in reliability results between the networks at AT&T Park in San Francisco and O.co Coliseum in Oakland. At AT&T Park, for example, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon all scored Excellent in reliability testing for both getting connected and staying connected. But at O.co Coliseum, none of the carriers reached our mark of excellence for getting connected, while only Sprint and Verizon scored Excellent for staying connected.

Explore for yourself

Check out the table below to see not just the full ranking of US baseball venues, but also individual network speed results for each stadium. Beyond venues, we’re busy testing networks across all the spaces of your mobile life. Stay tuned for additional reports showing how the networks compare at transit stations, university campuses, and more. Coupled with our look at nationwide, state, metro, and airport performance, it’s a full nation-to-neighborhood view of mobile network performance.

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