Faceoff vs. Tipoff – Which Fans Use the Most Data?

From jump shots to slap shots, this postseason has been one for the books for both hockey and basketball fans.

Across the country, both fans used our mobile network to share the most exciting moments from the playoffs on their mobile devices.

But which fan group uses the most mobile data?

During the offseason, our network team fine-tuned its game plan to give our customers a great experience at each arena. This helped fans post and share as much as they wanted during the hockey and basketball seasons.

This postseason, we used a venue-specific Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at every hockey and basketball arena where championship games took place.

Overall, basketball fans edged out hockey fans with the highest mobile data usage per game during the postseason.

More than 252GB of data was used per game on average across basketball arenas during the playoffs—beating out hockey fans by 24%. Hockey fans weren’t far behind though, using an average of 203GB per game, which is equal to 580K rink-side selfies.

During the basketball championship series, the game with highest data usage was Game 6 of Round 3 – Golden State vs Oklahoma City.

• 586GB traveled across our mobile network in just one game. To put that in perspective, 586GB is equal to more than 1.6M social media photo posts.

During the hockey championship series, the game with highest data usage was Game 2 of Round 2 – Dallas vs St. Louis.

• 390GB traveled across our mobile network in just one game. That's equal to more than 1.1M social media photo posts!