49ers’ stadium Wi-Fi served 25,000 concurrent users, 2.13TB in all

The San Francisco 49ers' heralded Wi-Fi network served its first NFL crowd in a preseason game on Sunday, and the team has now released statistics showing that it was able to serve lots of data to lots of fans, just as intended.

"We offloaded 2.13 terabytes during the event," 49ers VP of Technology Dan Williams told Mobile Sports Report. The newly built Levi's Stadium has 68,500 seats and more than a third of attendees used the Wi-Fi network simultaneously.

"We peaked at 24,775 (roughly 38 percent of attendance) concurrent connections with an average of 16,862 (roughly 25 percent of attendance)," Williams said.

At kickoff, the system was serving up 2.3Gbps. During the second busiest moment, less than an hour later, the Wi-Fi network was distributing 1.7Gbps throughout the stadium. "We averaged more than 1Gbps for more than two hours," Williams said.

That data includes only Wi-Fi, though cellular performance was reported to be strong as well due to small antennas distributed throughout the building.

A food-ordering app attracted the most users, followed by ticketing and then video. Video will become a bigger deal during the regular season when instant replays become available on a mobile app.

The Wi-Fi network had some problems on the crowded 2.4GHz band, performing better on 5GHz. "As you know, 2.4GHz is limited with non-overlapping channels, so we suspect a number of legacy devices may have some problems," Williams told Mobile Sports Report. "We know we still have some optimizations to do in the upper bowl and upper concourse while we continue to fine-tune the main bowl and concourse as we noticed our cell edge was weaker than expected when the stands were full."

Despite game video being blocked from mobile devices at this year's Super Bowl in New Jersey, the Wi-Fi network served 3.2TB of data, with a peak of 13,500 concurrent users out of 82,529 fans, according to Extreme Networks. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram accounted for much of the usage, with "more than 5 pictures per second" being uploaded to Instagram from Wi-Fi.