Distributed Antenna Systems make milestone moments like the Super Bowl shareable
Imagine filing into the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with more than 70,000 other fans to watch a historical competition between two National Football League franchises who have never lost the big game and this year’s teams are coached by brothers. Not to mention that the halftime show features Beyoncé, the Top Female Artist of the 2000s decade as named by Billboard, who reunites with gal pals from her former group, Destiny’s Child.
This is the type of experience that you want to share with family, friends, and probably anyone else who will listen. And you wouldn’t be alone. The halftime show itself is the second most tweeted about moment in history at 268,000 tweets per minute only to be topped by the partial power outage that occurred at the beginning of the third quarter.
Fortunately, the stadium’s wireless service provider (WSP), in conjunction with Vertiv, prepared for this increase in data traffic with a network upgrade — installation of an in-building distributed antenna system (iDAS).
Just like 5G promises high system capacity and a high data throughput speed for reduced latency, that’s precisely what DAS brings to a stadium or edge-of-network environment. In the Superdome case where a boost in capacity was needed to handle large crowds, the signal was fed from an on-site headend. In between the antenna and headend, the signal was carried over fiber cables to DAS remote units that were strategically placed throughout the venue.
The successful DAS deployment at the Superdome in New Orleans was due in large part to the telecommunication industry experience of the Vertiv team and our expertise in DC power system infrastructure. In addition to Liebert uninterruptible power supplies, the Superdome headends housed the modular NetSure™ 721 power system and incorporated Vertiv™ XTE enclosures — equipment that is easily scaled to meet the continually growing demand for connectivity.
Vertiv continues to deploy DAS infrastructure for WSPs around the globe and is actively supporting DAS enhancements at Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium in preparation for Super Bowl LIII.
Download the case study and see a list of other Vertiv DAS deployments. For an in-depth look at the type of infrastructure leveraged in these deployments, read our DAS brochure.