Has Evansville Planned and Designed for a Cellular Friendly Arena Experience?
Downtown Louisville is not particularly known as a dead zone for cellular service but as it turns out the new state of the art Yum Center must have some new and exotic materials that suppress the cellular service that is available in the new downtown arena. It could be a bandwidth bottleneck that 22,000 screaming fans create when texting each other, checking out other scores, or watching replays on handheld devices that is creating annoyance among the attendees wanting to use wireless devices during events. Then again, it could be that the structure itself attenuates the signals causing dropped calls and slow refresh rates.
Whatever the source of the problem, just two months after opening the Yum Center is already in a situation where they are in need of a $2M upgrade to boost the cellular service inside the new arena. This upgrade will involve installing approximately 400 antennas to boost the service capacity from three cellular carriers. The funding source to cover the cost of the $2M project has not been disclosed.
Downtown Evansville has long been an area with weak cellular coverage. Long connection times and dropped calls are the norm both on the sidewalks and inside offices. Many offices only have cellular service if one faces west, tilts their head to the side just right, and stares at a north facing wall. Reliable cellular service is already a problem in Downtown Evansville so one would anticipate the it will be an even bigger problem when 10,000 people want to text each other and watch replays on hand held devices in the new Evansville Arena. Is a solution already designed?
The City County Observer based on the recent debacle with lack of planning for a Downtown Convention Hotel is especially interested in the current state of a project to assure that the signal strength and bandwidth will be sufficient for attendees to access their phones during events at the Evansville Arena.
Given the fact that Louisville had a big oversight with cellular service and the Evansville has already suffered through the humiliation of just “assuming” that a hotel would materialize we would like to pose a question to John Kish. That question is, “what is the plan to enable the Evansville Arena to assure sufficient signal and bandwidth so that hand held devices will work reliably inside?”.
We will publish the response to this question without bias or edit of any kind. A link to the article about the cellular boost project may be accessed through the following link.
DONT ASK THEM THAT QUESTION
It will cost them >2mil to do the study to even determine if it will be a problem or not.
Close your eyes and full steam ahead!
Go big or go home, Louisville. You already have that massive slugger bat…
Similarly, you could erect two massive, extra-crispy, chicken wings pointed into the sky? (that might cover the needed antennas)
Or, how about a massive bag of Cinnamon twists on the roof?
Mmmmmmmmm…
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As far as our cell reception. After this big water main break that flooded the Civic Center reported, ancient, lines. Well, I’m going to be more concerned that the toilets work, when they are at capacity! (Especially during a firm, flash rain.)
Eville Taxpayer,
In one post you’ve used the terms massive bat, massive wings, massive bag, firm and flash. How should we interpret all of this ?
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