Super Bowl is the climax of the US National Football League (NFL) and has long also been a showpiece for TV technology where vendors and service providers seek to show off their latest innovations. This year, for the first time, mobile video arguably stole the show in the event widely billed as the first 5G Super Bowl.
In the case of TV, rights rotate between three broadcasters, NBC, Fox and CBS and this year was the turn of the latter to show off any advances in resolutions, quality or content in a pandemic year. For cellular all of the big three, AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, had built dedicated 5G networks serving spectators in and around the stadium and so were inevitably in contention for headline data rates and quality of service (QoS) in particular.
The crowd was limited by Covid restrictions to 25,000 for this year’s event at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, Florida on February 7 2021, down from 62,417 in 2020 at the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami, but even that degree of normality still seems a way off for many countries, as well as other US states where more severe restrictions are still in place.
The reduced crowds curtailed contention on networks and helped the three operators exhibit pleasing headline rates, while also giving a welcome publicity boost for 5G among consumers.
Independent test results were available quickly from networking benchmarking firm Global Wireless Solutions (GWS), which reported that all three carriers improved substantially for both maximum and average throughputs over 2020, for 5G on its own and combined with 4G. AT&T won for download speeds inside the stadium at 1.26Gbps, up from 337Mbps in 2020, while Verizon in second was up from 200Mbps to 432Mbps and then T-Mobile at 388Mbps, up from just 31Mbps last year.
AT&T also topped peak 5G speeds around the stadium at 1.71Gbps, followed by 1.51Gbps for Verizon and 1.09Gbps for T-Mobile. These compared respectively with 878Mbps, 924Mbps and 175Mbps in 2020.
Perhaps most revealing was that the improvements resulted at least partly from considerable utilization of aggregated spectrum, suggesting that this can help achieve promised levels of performance as intended and indeed expected. GWS reported that AT&T was aggregating eight channels nearly three quarters of the time, yielding 800 MHz of bandwidth in the millimeter wave 39 GHz range. Verizon was commonly aggregating six channels in the 28 GHz band, yielding 600 MHz, and T-Mobile four carriers again at 39 GHz, or 400 MHz.
This bandwidth was made available in and around the stadium at sufficient density to enable ubiquitous coverage with at least acceptable performance. AT&T had 66 of its 67 cells delivering 5G, and Verizon 62 of its 81 in the vicinity. T-Mobile had 40 of its 41 cells issuing 5G.
This leads to the most important point about this year’s Super Bowl 5G experience, that the networks delivered enough capacity and speed to satisfy the use cases on show consistently for all users with ubiquitous coverage. Bit-rates were occasionally way below those averages cited, but 5G demonstrated it could deliver the sustained performance not achievable with either 4G/LTE or WiFi.
It seems the operators got the deployment about right for the size of the crowds and might have needed an even denser network in a normal year, remembering that they were catering for the event between them and so total capacity was an aggregate of their individual contributions.
But then they knew what size of crowd they had to budget for and it was still a costly exercise, with Verizon alone investing $80m in what it described as the densest mmWave network it had yet deployed, all within a three-mile radius of the stadium. Apart from those small cells that deployment included in-building systems and 60 miles of fiber.
The ambition for the experience seems to have been fairly well-judged too. It was decided that everyone running NFL’s app would get access to seven simultaneous streams at 720p resolution from different camera angles, which required a base capacity of 34Mbps, the floor set for the bit-rate.
Verizon’s VP of device technology, Brian Mecum, insisted that neither 4G nor WiFi, even in the latest incarnations, could guarantee that performance. We should point out though that 5G at present cannot normally guarantee that performance either, only given dense mmWave configurations. Indeed, viewers at home beyond that three-mile radius of the stadium with 5G connections were only given five streams at the reduced quality of 480i, admittedly still good on a smartphone screen, requiring a guaranteed 5.4Mbps.
Putting this together, we can see that Super Bowl has made the consumer case for 5G quite strongly, but only at this stage as a stadium or venue experience. There is an irony here at a time when so many consumers have been denied such experiences for up to a year now.
However, when as we assume life does return to normal, 5G will have many more chances to shine not just in packed sports stadia but also other public venues where HD or ultra HD video will feature prominently, such as concerts and conventions, as well as other major events. Then as consumers become more accustomed to the experiences they will be demanding high quality uploading as well, which will drive 5G in other public arenas, including airports and shopping malls.
We also saw at Super Bowl incipient demand for 5G in other professional contexts, notably for backhauling mobile cameras. Even this year cameras around the event were trailed by cables that constrain mobility and 5G will offer an alternative that would also enable smaller cameras to be used. Operators have been trialing 5G cameras, but as Verizon’s Mecum has pointed out, it will require support from camera makers as well as broadcasters to gain wider adoption and so that is a trend to look out for at future Super Bowls, or other such events when they come back on stream.