From PC World: Mobile use is growing so fast that cells added for a big event like the Super Bowl are now worth keeping just for daily life.
Verizon Wireless is installing nearly 100 cells to make sure its network can handle the crush of a million or more fans around this year’s big game in the San Francisco Bay Area. Almost all will stay up after the game’s over.
The volume of phone calls, selfies, social media posts and videos spikes around an event like the Super Bowl. Verizon expects its traffic to double next week in downtown San Francisco, where several city blocks will be closed to cars for a fan gathering area called Super Bowl City.
Keeping up with that kind of demand forces carriers to plan ahead and get creative finding sites for their radios all over the urban landscape. Verizon started scoping out its US$70 million Super Bowl strategy two years ago and began installations last year. Along the way, it was thinking all the way ahead to 5G, the next generation of mobile networks.
In San Francisco alone, the carrier is installing 46 small cells and 10 traditional “macro” cells for the week of the game. One of those is a so-called COW, or cell on wheels, a tower that can be towed to different sites when demand spikes. It already looms near San Francisco Bay, next to COWs from AT&T and T-Mobile and just down the street from a Sprint mobile tower.
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