In two weeks, 85,000 people are expected to cram themselves into Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis, Indiana to check out the NFL’s annual Super Bowl. This will be the 46th championship game in pro football in the US and you can bet that a lot of people who attend the game will be bringing their smartphones, tablets, laptops, and other wireless devices to communicate with others at the game.
GottaBeMobile.com reports that Verizon Wireless is already on the ground at both the stadium as well as downtown Indianapolis to help ease the pressure of using smartphones and laptops at the Super Bowl. This will be the first Super Bowl with a faster LTE-based wireless network and Verizon will set up three Cell on Wheels (COWs) at the stadium on game day. These are mobile cell phone towers that will help to handle the predicted increase in cell phone traffic.
While the COWs will go home after the end of the game, Verizon is also setting up some other network improvements at the stadium and in downtown Indianapolis that will be permanent. That includes nine Distributed Antenna Systems outside the stadium, 400 Internal DAS antennas inside the stadium, and 600 WiFi antennas in the stadium. WiFi access will be free to people who come to the stadium during the Super Bowl. The overall costs of the upgrades came to nearly $69 million.