Looking to Score with 5G at the Super Bowl

While fans are anxiously hoping their playoff team makes it to Super Bowl LVIII, the teams from Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile are already in Las Vegas, Nevada, making sure their networks are ready, bringing in extra capacity and technical staff to handle the expected surge in mobile traffic in and around the stadium.

Although Super Bowl LVIII will be played at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas on Sunday, February 11, 2024, there will be a set of events throughout Super Bowl Week, such as Opening Night and Super Bowl Experience, with immersive experiences for fans of all ages. What is essential to these mobile operators’ network operations and engineering teams is to know how their 5G networks perform before, during, and after the game. They will spend a lot of time, money, and resources getting 5G-ready.

Engineering a Super Experience

While fans will be looking at the scoreboard, network ops, and engineering will be looking at their dashboards and KPIs.

These mobile operator teams will employ continuous performance monitoring solutions with advanced analytics to gain visibility and insights into the traffic to understand how their networks are performing, proactively managing any service degradations and analyzing how applications and services are being consumed to determine the end user experience.

Although assuring a good mobile service experience at the event is paramount, the mobile operators also will be interested in business analytics gleaned from the network traffic.

• What are the most popular handsets?
• Which ones offer the best quality of service in 5G?
• What are the most popular websites?
• What is the user experience like on 5G versus 4G?

These mobile operators will be looking at the new iPhone 15 as well as other smartphones such as Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel. The smartphone performance outcomes may impact what brands and models they sell and service going forward.

Touching Down on Personalization

This mobile traffic data (along with requisite personal privacy protection) enriched with billing and other operation support systems (OSS) data can yield rich information for network personalization. Although we expect fans will be watching the game, we know they also will be looking at videos on their smartphones during the game—and not just at replays! Surely, tens of thousands of smartphone cameras will be trained on the halftime performer, Usher. Attendees at the game also will be looking at and posting videos on YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook as well as social media sites such as Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter/X.

Again, the engineering and operations teams will want answers to the following questions:

• What is the video quality for these and other applications?
• Which phones and applications had the best and worst experience?
• What events at the Super Bowl bring the biggest crowds?
• How much time on average did someone spend at a given event?
• What QR codes did they access?

For the 5G network infrastructure, engineering teams will want to know how the different vendors’ 5G New Radio (NR) technology performed, as well as the different vendors’ 5G core and edge elements responsible for the setup of voice, video, and data sessions; authentication; mobility; and more.

Upping the Game with Smart Data

Gaining these valuable business insights comes from having continuous observability to all the traffic, all the time. NETSCOUT will be providing Visibility Without Borders and our Smart Data at the game and the surrounding area, providing actionable intelligence to help mobile operators get the most out of 5G technology throughout Super Bowl Week.

     
 Learn more about NETSCOUT Smart Data Analytics solutions.