Tampa Bay Lightning Fans Up Their Mobile Game During Hockey Playoffs

Tampa Bay fans flooded Amalie Arena with their smartphones in hand to be part of this year’s professional hockey postseason action, and in doing so, they pushed AT&T’s network traffic forward on a fast break.

All year long, AT&T’s network team fine-tuned its game plan to give our customers a great experience at each arena – and we delivered in the clutch. We had a venue-specific Distributed Antenna System (DAS) in place at 10 arenas for the pro hockey playoffs this year.

Here’s what we saw from customers using the DAS network at these arenas:

· Total data usage from all rounds of playoff games combined at 10 different arenas was 7.4TB (terabytes). 7.4TB is equal to more than 21.3 million social media posts with photos.

· Total data usage from the finals of the playoffs at both arenas was 1.3TB. 1.3TB is equal to more than 3.7 million social media posts with photos.

· The average data usage per game across both venues during the finals was 221GB/game.

· Compared to the average game in the month of March data usage increased 97% at these venues during the finals.

These numbers aren’t entirely surprising as we are finding more and more AT&T customers are using their mobile devices at sporting events to share the most memorable experiences – from vicious checks to slap shots. To help make this possible, AT&T has stacked its network roster by fine-tuning its Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at the arena in Tampa Bay for the playoff action – and the results are showing on the data scoreboard.

During the finals of the pro hockey 2015 playoff home series in Tampa Bay fans used an average of approximately 135 gigabytes per game on the AT&T venue-specific cellular network. That’s equal to 386K social media posts with photos. This is 90-percent more data usage than the average game in the month of March. Even more amazing, this is 53 percent more data usage than the average game in the first round of the playoffs. Across all rounds of the playoffs combined, fans in Tampa Bay used 1.3 terabytes of data, which is equal to 3.8 million social media posts with photos.