Data Demand in the Desert: Debut of New Headliner Antenna at L.A. Music Festival
When more than 75,000 festival-goers descend upon the big music festival in Indio this weekend, there will be plenty of social-media worthy moments to share. To score with this data-hungry crowd, our Los Angeles network team is rolling out something new this year – the Drum Set Antenna.
The Drum Set Antenna is arguably the largest, highest-capacity cellular antenna in the world. And we’ll be the first to use anything like it at the upcoming festival.
The Drum Set Antenna adds on to last year’s Ten-Ten Antenna. The Ten-Ten Antenna will be making an encore performance alongside the Drum Set Antenna this year. While the Drum Set Antenna looks like the Ten-Ten Antenna on the outside, it actually offers more than double the wireless capacity and is 100 pounds heavier.
The Drum Set Antenna consists of 2 spherical balls with their tops and bottoms cut off— like drums. These send out radio frequency (RF) signals in various directions based on how the network engineers attach transmitting elements to each antenna. This lets technicians send precise cellular signals wherever they need to go.
All this will give you a better experience sharing those texts, pictures and videos from the festival. The Drum Set Antenna is able to offer 30x the capacity of a traditional, single-beam antenna –not only an AT&T record, but an industry one.
The Drum Set Antenna won’t be a solo-act at the festival. It’s joining a rock star line-up providing strong wireless coverage for festival goers. This year, we’ll have 4 COWs (Cell on Wheels) at the festival with each one supporting their own specialty high-capacity antenna—providing nearly 90% more LTE capacity at the main stage area compared to last year.
Last year, we handled a new record traffic total for the event, 24.2 TB of traffic–that’s more than 70 million selfies. With social media sharing is becoming more and more popular every year and the Drum Set Antenna giving you more network capacity to handle it all -- this could mean a new data usage record this year.
