Cellular Capacity Gets Big Boost For Game

If your cell phone doesn't work well around Raymond James Stadium lately, it must be turned off.

That's because the major U.S. cellular providers are packing the stadium neighborhood with enough extra wireless capacity to keep a major city texting, calling and trading cellular videos during the Super Bowl.

Add to this tens of millions of dollars in cellular upgrades at hotels, the airport, South Tampa, Ybor City and just about anywhere else tourists might venture with cell phone in hand.

The nightmare all these cellular companies want to avoid is a cellular traffic jam, just as celebrities, VIPs and tens of thousands of football fanatics converge in Tampa for the nation's biggest sporting event.

Such glitches are known all too well to anyone who's sent a text message only to find it arrived several hours later, not a few seconds later as it should. And during the recent presidential inauguration, metro Washington turned into a digital black hole at times when cellular networks jammed.

It's less likely Tampa systems could break down, simply because of the numbers involved. The National Mall attracted as many as 2 million people. Tampa's stadium area will probably attract less than 200,000 during the game.

Still, that's a lot of people with the potential to send cellular photos.

"We're actually buying tickets for two of our people to sit in the stadium during the game and just monitor system performance," Verizon Wireless spokesman Chuck Hamby said. "That's something like $900 per ticket for basically our 'Can you hear me now' test man."

Most of the upgrades are permanent equipment, so Tampa will benefit from beefier wireless and cellular broadband in the years ahead.

At last count:

•Sprint has installed 18 new cellular sites in the stadium and downtown areas - each powerful enough to connect calls for a small city.

•AT&T doubled its voice and data call capacity in the stadium, and tripled its 3G capacity for gadgets like Apple iPhones and wireless Internet links. Extra antennas went into the NFL practice fields at the University of South Florida.

•Verizon boosted its 22 stadium-area antennas and is spending more than $1 million on new equipment in the stadium.

•T-Mobile is boosting several of its sites in the core Tampa area.

Also, a small fleet of antenna trucks from each provider are converging around the stadium and downtown Tampa, hoisting tall masts of extra cellular antennas.

Just don't expect the traffic jam to clear up on Monday after the game.

The day after a big event can bring the heaviest traffic, say officials at Syniverse Technologies, which handles billions of messages sent between carriers. People may take a cell phone picture of friends at a party, but they'll wait until the next day at work to send them, creating a "water cooler effect."

That's why text message traffic actually dropped by about 5 percent on game day in 2006, 2007 and 2008, according to Syniverse data. The next day, traffic surged 19 percent above average.

The Super Bowl may sound like the biggest event in the world, but other events around here actually produce far more traffic. The Gasparilla parade, for example, regularly brings more than half a million people into a small area, Verizon's Hamby said, and can drive 20 times the traffic of a normal day.