Most of us ordinary humans just finished watching the Patriots (eventually) trounce the Rams on the biggest TV we could find, but 75,000 lucky individuals saw Gostkowski's 41-yard field goal and that controversial halftime performance LIVE in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. And if you’ve been watching social media at all, you know that they were all sharing their experiences online. But were people struggling with stadium Wi-Fi and surrounding cell networks to get those messages out?

Short answer: the internet speeds were far superior to the game play.

The long answer is that providing fast, consistent connectivity for this many people in a small area is hard. A lot of prep went into making sure today’s fans could connect to the internet when and how they wanted to.

Why it’s so hard to provide fast internet to large crowds

Congestion is the main blocker for mobile operators and stadium engineers trying to provide high-quality, fast internet at sporting events.

On cellular, operators generally invest in enough cell towers to provide service to an area on an average day. But when a large crowd tries to use that same infrastructure to connect on a game day, there just isn’t enough network capacity to serve the whole crowd.

As for the Wi-Fi, Jussi Kiviniemi, Senior Vice President at Ekahau explains, “If the Wi-Fi network is designed at the same time as the stadium is built, then the Wi-Fi access points can be placed in optimal locations. This is because one can affect the cabling of the stadium at this time. The challenge comes if the Wi-Fi is designed, or re-designed, after the stadium has been designed and built.” He identifies the biggest internet killer as “the number of people using their mobile devices, combined with the fact that a stadium is an open area. This means a lot of the devices are using the same frequency, thus interfering with one another and reducing one anothers’ performance.” Ekahau was recently acquired by Ookla.

Mobile operators were prepared for the big game

Today’s big game is no ordinary sporting event, though, and operators have been preparing their game plan to give their customers the best service possible since last year. Here’s how:

The stadium Wi-Fi was designed for this traffic

As a newer facility, Mercedes-Benz Stadium was designed with technology in mind including an initial Wi-Fi setup that included 1,800 wireless access points and 80 Gbps of internet bandwidth capacity supported by 4,000 miles of fiber cable.

Kiviniemi described typical stadium Wi-Fi set-up options, saying most stadiums use any one or a combination of the following:

Handrail: Wi-Fi access points (APs) mounted on the handrails of the stadium. This requires specially made antennas.

Overhead: APs mounted up high in the structures. This requires highly directional antennas to work well.

Under seat: This requires specialized casings for the Wi-Fi access points that are mounted under the stadium seats.

Kiviniemi added, “Wi-Fi at a stadium is tough and needs super-careful RF (radio frequency) planning. The biggest stadiums, including the Mercedes-Benz Stadium, are built by the best Wi-Fi engineers in business. The number of client devices connected to Wi-Fi, the openness of the area, the building’s structural shape and limited mounting locations for Wi-Fi access points are some of the main challenges.”

The level of detail that goes into planning stadium Wi-Fi is extraordinary. A couple of years ago, Chuck Lukaszewski of HPE-Aruba suggested that stadiums plan to support one device for every two people and target having 75% of users on a 5 GHz band and 25% on the 2.4 GHz band. We can only assume that stadiums today are planning for more devices and for more of those devices to be on the more modern 5 GHz band. The planning is so detailed that Wi-Fi engineers are considering the percentage of frames transmitted that actually contain data.

If you’re interested in delving in deeper, Ekahau has recommended specs for stadium Wi-Fi set-up as recently as 2018, and will be hosting a new webinar on Wi-Fi in high-capacity spaces on February 12, 2019.

About those game speeds

Cellular speeds for the win

Overall cellular speeds were awesome. Compared to the Peach Bowl, also played at Mercedes-Benz Stadium just over a month ago, average download speed over mobile increased 19.4% to 71.23 Mbps. Considering fans at last year’s big game used more than 7.2 TB of data on AT&T’s network alone, we expected to see a drop in cellular speeds, but all that prep seems to have paid off for mobile operators today. This was 122.5% faster than the average download speed over cellular in the U.S. during December 2018.

We compared the big four mobile operators from kick-off to 30 minutes after the game ended to see who won. Here’s what we saw:

Mobile Operator Performance at the Big Game

Mercedes-Benz Stadium | February 3, 2019 Operator Mean Download (Mbps) T-Mobile 101.53 Sprint 93.28 Verizon 72.51 AT&T 34.88

T-Mobile was the fastest, followed by Sprint and then Verizon. AT&T came in last.

Verizon was routing most of their customers through their own Wi-Fi network, where we saw an average download speed of 46.42 Mbps.

Mercedes-Benz Stadium Wi-Fi stood strong

Official stats on Wi-Fi internet usage during today’s game have not yet been announced, but in January 2018 fans at Mercedes-Benz Stadium used 12 terabytes of data at the 2018 College Football Playoff championship. The average Speedtest result during that game showed a download speed of 53.95 Mbps. Considering that last year’s big game in Minneapolis used over 16 TB of data and the average Wi-Fi download speed was 20.71 Mbps (in the mid to low range of speeds we’d seen there over the year), we expected Wi-Fi speeds at Mercedes-Benz Stadium to dip under heavy usage. They did not.

Wi-Fi Performance at Mercedes-Benz Stadium

Based on Speedtest results Game Mean Download (Mbps) Mean Upload (Mbps) The Big Game - February 3, 2019 30.98 31.35 Peach Bowl - December 29, 2018 30.36 33.28 College Championship - January 8, 2018 53.95 53.04

It's hard to overestimate the strain an event like this puts on a Wi-Fi network, even more so when a stadium full of fans is waiting for something, anything to happen on the field. While the average download speed during today's game was just slightly faster than it was at the Peach Bowl, and less than it had been during last year's college championship, fans turning to the internet for their entertainment would not have been disappointed. Though Wi-Fi provided by Verizon was faster than the stadium Wi-Fi, Verizon's Wi-Fi likely had to serve far fewer people.

Are you getting the download and upload speeds you need at your favorite sporting event? Take a Speedtest to find out.