Will Evansville Lead the Pack by Getting the Wireless Services Right for Opening Day?
The City County Observer recently discovered and published the fact that Louisville’s new downtown arena called Yum Center missed the boat on being able to get good cellular service inside when 22,000 screaming fans are wanting to text each other and their unfortunate friends stuck at home in front of the television. Louisville has acted quickly to put a $2M solution in place by retrofitting 400 antennas into the Yum Center to hopefully provide coverage for three different carriers.
It seems as though the City of Louisville’s arena design group is not the only stadium or arena in the country to be dealing with the problem of signal saturation and bandwidth depletion at sporting events. In preparation for the upcoming Super Bowl the new $1.2 Billion Texas Stadium is having to do the same thing. The home of the Dallas Cowboys is doing a $3.5 Million upgrade that will involve adding 1,000 antennas and adaptively controlled bandwidth optimization equipment to as charismatic Cowboys owner Jerry Jones says “assure” that 150,000 fans can text at will. Here is a video from the Dallas Fox affiliate to describe the project.
http://www.i4u.com/44504/super-bowl-stadium-got-1000-antennas-support-150000-phone-users
It seems as though nearly every arena and stadium from Houston to Columbus to Ann Arbor has become the butt of jokes in recent years for failing to have adequate infrastructure to support the demand for cellular service during events. Locally, the Westside Nut Club’s Fall Festival is notorious for wreaking havoc on cellular reception. One Ohio State fan quipped that “cell phones and Wolverines always get killed in Columbus”.
As this is a widespread and widely publicized problem, the City County Observer is quite curious about just what the designers of the new state of the art Evansville Arena have done to assure that attendees at downtown events will be able to enjoy the events in a digital fashion that is worthy of a modern arena. Of course Evansville will not need 1,000 antennas but we will need a couple of hundred and some serious bandwidth available to satisfy the demands.
Once again, we ask and wonder, will we be able to use our new phones in the new arena or will we have to wait for a million dollar upgrade to be able to do so?
what’s the point? A few thousand cell phones going off and disrupting a concert? What did we do without cell phones?
People like to text each other at sporting events and send pictures back and forth at concerts. If there is no signal available they can’t do that. The point is that stadiums and arenas all over the country are having to spend money to correct for insufficient bandwidth to satisfy people who spend good money on tickets to events. This is a well known problem. We are just asking what Evansville’s solution is. Since it is a well known problem it should have been in the budget but we can’t find it anywhere.
I have a cell phone and our one year old arena (in Wichita) is cell phone/texting friendly and continually updated as needed. My issue is with the “need” to use cell phones at events “or else” we won’t spend good money on events. I say this tongue-in-cheek. I sincerely hope your arena is designed with up-to-date-technology. BTW, I discovered your website while following the CVB scandal. Too bad we didn’t have PC’s in the 70’s. We definitely needed CCO back then! E’ville is my hometown.
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