Cell phones in crowded areas

Factual Questions
1

I’m talking about places with really large crowds, such as football stadiums. Some college stadiums can seat over 100,000 people, although they only get that many people maybe 6 or 8 days a year. The rest of the time, the stadium either sits empty or has a much lower population density.

So what do the major cell phone providers do for such events? With that many people, they could have several thousand of their customers in one cell at once which would probably overload it. I suppose they could break the stadium down into micro-cells, but that takes extra equipment.

So do they bring in extra equipment, have the stadium permanently broken down into micro-cells, or just let things go to hell for a while? And if they do bring in equipment, how large an anticipated crowd does there have to be before they do it?

2

Can’t answer for a football stadium. but here in St. Louis when the July 4th fair is held at the riverfront, the cell companies have added portable cell sites called COWs. COWs stands for Cellular on Wheels. These are hardwired, or microwave linked, into the system and provide increased capacity for special events.

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