Verizon and AT&T subscribers at Outside Lands used enough data to post more than 48 million selfies

This year, Outside Lands Music Festival attendees were apparently more connected than they've ever been before.

For the 2016 event, Verizon Wireless rolled out what the company calls "COWs," or, Cell on Wheels that are "generator-powered mobile cell sites," in an effort to enable a greater network performance for its users than they've typically had at the massive three day event.

As a result, Verizon, as well as its competitor AT&T, reported huge data usage numbers by their customers onsite.

Verizon, for one, told SFGATE that there was a 65 percent increase in data usage compared to last year. That type of increase was no doubt influenced by more people using apps like Snapchat, as well as an increase in the number of recurring Facebook users. For Verizon, that usage translated into a massive 9.5 Terabytes of data sent in total over the three days.

For the hours between 4pm and 10pm — the busiest hours of the festival — Verizon reports that roughly one million "connections" per hour were sent by subscribers. As a "connection" is equivalent to pretty much any sort of social media post, those using Verizon during just these six hours per day are alone responsible for using enough data to power 18 million social media posts, or, in probably quite a few cases, selfies. Considering that Outside Lands began each day at noon, that number is likely even much higher.

AT&T users were similarly busy. Reporting that throughout the span of the weekend, its subscribers used 10.3 Terabytes, an AT&T spokesman tells SFGATE that that number is the equivalent to around 29.6 million selfies posted during the weekend — a 250 percent increase over usage in 2015.

Together with Verizon, that amount of data used translates to roughly 19.8 Terabytes, meaning the number of hypothetical selfies posted from Golden Gate Park swells to an incredible total of 48 million selfies. Let's just hope there was some fun being had between those frequent tweets and snaps?

Alyssa Pereira is a staff writer for SFGATE. Follow her here on Twitter.