Tackling Connectivity: Opportunities From and Obstacles To Wireless Network Innovation
Football season is in full swing, and crowds for the biggest college games regularly top 100,000. Rain or shine, fans are packing stadiums to cheer on their teams. On the field, players are competing in an era of unprecedented insight and strategy, with more knowledge about their health and gameplay than ever before. As is so often the case in sports, there is hard work happening behind the scenes. Fans and officials’ ability to connect while in a stadium during a game, despite weather, sheer capacity, and other unforeseen circumstances hinges on strong wireless connectivity.
Stadiums in Louisiana are taking this connection seriously. This year, Louisiana State University (LSU) announced a major AT&T project to improve wireless services for fans in Death Valley. LSU’s newspaper, The Reveille, put this enhancement in perspective, noting that the upgrade will allow “fans, students and first responders to send texts and make calls quicker throughout the games.” The stakes are far higher than allowing a fan to record and upload a video of the game to their social media. First responders and safety officials rely on wireless networks to communicate quickly and reliably, monitoring situations and responding to emergencies.
Similarly, while preparing for the 2025 Super Bowl, Caesars Superdome in New Orleans underwent an $80 million wireless upgrade. Safety and fan experience stood to benefit, but so did the inner workings of the stadium. Reporting on the upgrade, The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate noted that the “WiFi coverage boost will not only enhance the use of personal mobile devices for fans but will also make it easier for employees to take tickets with handheld scanners and for vendors to accept credit card payment with wireless devices.” Robust wireless helps to make the scale of the modern live football experience possible.
The same kind of wireless networks that connects thousands of fans and streamlines transactions, safety protocols, and communication on gameday is also foundational to matters of profound gravity: storm preparedness, emergency call services, and remote health monitoring, to name a few. When people need connectivity the most, they rely on wireless services to ensure they can reach help. From crowded stadiums to emergency preparedness, the need for reliable wireless service is not going away.
Despite this necessity and the ongoing demand, a collection of permitting and regulatory barriers consistently makes meeting this demand difficult. Local governments have different requirements for wireless buildout, and the speed available from wireless networks stands in stark contrast to the slowness of navigating layers of bureaucracy and particular requirements across states and localities. However, work toward a more national standard is underway via the Federal Communications Commission’s (FCC) “Build America” efforts, which, among other things, are weighing ways to reign in local permitting fees and make the rules of the road more clear. At the end of September, the FCC voted to ease some of the national compliance requirements centered around the environment, a huge step towards streamlining the permitting process. This change will help to accelerate project buildout, but the patchwork of local rules remains an obstacle.
Like the work that makes gameday possible, the behind-the-scenes work of removing red tape and bureaucracy that hinders innovation and connection will be vital to ensure that fans, first responders, and all those who rely on wireless are not left without coverage.
