I was just wondering how those of you who attend sporting events regularly feel about their cell phone’s service provider’s coverage. I go to a lot of sporting events and I have a smartphone on AT&T as does my girlfriend. Mine’s a WP7 and hers is an iPhone.
Any time we go to a game our phones are basically bricks. They both show full bars but every time we try and use any data or make a call nothing works. It’s freaking infuriating. I know this is mostly to do with too many phones and not enough bandwidth, but I’m curious how universal this experience is.
Do you guys have the same issue? Where are you and what carrier do you use?
I’m curious if it’s worth bitching to AT&T and switching networks or if this is a universal problem everyone has.
I have an iPhone, and AT&T. It was slow, but manageable, when I was at the United Center for a Chicago Blackhawks game last month. When I was up at Lambeau Field for a Packer game last season (with three times the number of attendees), it was atrocious.
I get a weak 4G signal in a portion of the upper deck in Comerica Park in Detroit. Other than that, there’s nowhere in Michigan that I know of that you can get a 4G signal from Sprint.
So that’s nice. Outside of that, I haven’t had any complaints at sporting events. Email and texting and everything else seemed to go just fine.
Silly question, have you tried doing a hard re-boot inside the stadium? I only ask because in Dodger stadium my Windows 7 phone was constantly trying to get a connection and chewed up the battery. A colleague mentioned that his phone was working fine and he was getting all his emails, so I did the re-boot and back in business.
If you have a decent signal (and that signal is for your operator or one they have an agreement with), the most likely cause is congestion. Each radio channel can only handle so many simultaneous calls. When all the slots on all the channels for the base station your phone is camping on are in use, you won’t be able to make a call. Data is a bit different, but it suffers from congestion problems, too.
AT&T upgraded their network at Soldier Field last year, I know–is that one of the places where you have had trouble? Has it gotten any better this year? I don’t do radio work these days, but from what I’ve read, they probably added more picocells to increase capacity. There’s really only so much they can do, though–there’s no way they can support everyone trying to make a call and/or send pictures at once. Each picocell will only handle about 14 simultaneous calls, and you might have over 60,000 people in the stadium.
Cellular networks in general just don’t cope with that kind of situation well. The basic assumptions of cellular–that a relatively small number of people will be making short voice calls at any given time–are breaking down. The networks aren’t really ready for the ubiquity of phones at all, let alone smartphones. I’m glad I’m no longer the one stuck with figuring out how to cram enough cells into a stadium to handle it.
T-Mo Android user. I have not had any issues in the last few years in Athens at Georgia home games, in Atlanta at Tech, or in Atlanta in the Georgia Dome.
Darlington (NASCAR Race Track) used to be really spotty back when T-Mo was roaming on Sun Com over there, but things have improved greatly the last couple of years.
There are a couple of things to consider, though.
First, there are a lot fewer T-Mo users in any crowd, especially heavy data users. Also, notwithstanding their creepy Christmas Orgy (4G) commercials, no one goes with T-Mo with data speed or throughput (or coverage) as their primary concern. So they are serving a lot less people who are happy paddling around in a lot shallower pool.
Second, I don’t pull a lot of data in a situation like that, so even with an identical phone on T-Mo in the same spot you might have a different experience. All I use the phone for is texting during the event, the occasional call either way before or way after the event, and checking either other SEC scores on a very simple ESPN score page, or checking the live weather radar before, during, and after. I don’t need a 3G connection for that…
Samsung Galaxy S II LTE works great at Scotiabank Place in Ottawa. A few years back they used to have free wi-fi there, but when everyone and their brother got a smartphone with wi-fi capabilities on it, they scrapped that as a cost saving measure.
Earlier in the year, I still had the Blackberry Bold, and I was complaining about how I couldn’t get any service despite the fact that I was getting full bars inside the arena. Turns out that was the week that the RIM network collapse, and it just so happened to affect me while I was at a Senators game.
Most recently I was in Lambeau and I could send texts but I couldn’t get any data service, no Facebook updates, ESPN or photo uploads/MMS. It was infuriating. When I was in the UC for Blackhawks games I had similar issues. When I go to Wrigley for baseball games in the summer the outage seems to be marginally more functional, I can eventually connect to get data for Facebook and Twitter etc., but the outage spreads well beyond the park to the entire surrounding area’s bars.
I’ve done a bit of Googling but I’ve found a surprising lack of discussion on what would presumably be a common and maddening issue.
I’m in the UK on an Android, whenever I go to a Bolton Wanderers game (usually 20k ish attending), even though the signal strength appears fine, internet doesn’t work at all.
South Bend on gameday is impossible to get a wireless signal. I think last year they tried bringing in a portable tower for Irish football games, and it helped a little bit, but not a ton. AT&T and Verizon are terrible, at least on my and my friends’ iphones.
Texts are a special case. The amount of data in a text is so tiny that it can piggyback on the control channel, rather than consuming a traffic channel. In terms of overhead, texts are effectively free, so if your phone can register on the cell at all, texts should go through. Texts going through when no other service works is more evidence that congestion is the problem.
The congestion likely spreads to the surrounding area because the cells in the stadium are handing over as many phones as they can to neighboring macro cells as part of a load-sharing algorithm. There are probably times when every cell that can be reached from the stadium is full. It’s also possible that the BSC (Base Station Controller) that handles cells for that area is getting overwhelmed, or that the data lines are maxed out, but I don’t think that’s likely–those usually have plenty of capacity, if the system is properly dimensioned.
Lambeau may be a special issue, too…during a game, you have 70,000 people in that stadium, whereas the entire population of the city of Green Bay is just above 100,000. Thus, you’re concentrating something like 3/4 of the total “normal” cell phone users for the entire city into one location – and then you likely have a lot of them wanting to use data services, all at once.
iPhone (AT&T) does not work at all during University of Alabama football games. (Over 100,000 inside stadium plus all the people outside on game days.)
This isn’t about stadiums, so perhaps is not entirely relevant, but when I’ve gone to the July 4 fireworks here in Columbus, my phone is completely useless. AT&T iPhone, for what it’s worth. I am able to get texts out, as noted above, but everything else is dead. This seems to happen any time I’m in a crowd of more than a thousand people or so.
I don’t have a smart phone, but last time I went to the Bell Centre with friends, their phone service seemed fine. One friend was in an on-going conversation with the guy she was dating throughout the entire game. I see a lot of people talking, texting and browsing while at hockey games there (or seeing them in the crowd on TV). In a place nicknamed the Phone Booth by some people and owned by one of the biggest cell phone service providers in Canada, I’d expect the service to be decent.
As I said, though, I don’t have first hand experience. My slightly-above-average-intelligence Blackberry Pearl gets good talk and data, for the limited apps I have on my plan.
