Drumming Up Data in the Desert
Each year one of the most highly-anticipated music events in the country takes place in the desert outside of Los Angeles. Thousands of attendees come for the tunes. But, once they’re on the grounds they want to connect.
That’s why we enhanced our coverage and capacity ahead of the festival. We rolled out a never-before-used antenna evolution. It’s dubbed the Ten-Ten-Antenna. It’s one of the largest cellular antennas in the world. The Ten-Ten-Antenna is a new take off last year’s Giant Eyeball Antenna, which made an encore performance alongside the Ten-Ten-Antenna this year. To help provide service to customers this year, we had a total of six antenna arrays with a collective 57 beams between the three COLTs (Cells on Light Trucks) and two COWs (Cell on Wheels) we deployed. And all this network power resulted in a lot of data.
Some AT&T mobile network traffic highlights from the first weekend of the music festival in the desert include:
- More than 12.2TB of data crossed our mobile network at the festival over the first three days combined.
o 12.2TB of data is equal to:
-More than 34.8M social media posts with photos
-More than 13,860 hours of HD Video
-More than 841K hours of surfing the web
- Data traffic on our mobile network at the event has experienced a dramatic climb over the last five years. Since 2011 traffic has grown 20x on our mobile network at the festival during the first weekend.
