...Ready for it? 5G to replace Wi-Fi in Stadiums
By Melroy Machado, Senior Director of Product Management
In 2024 and 2025, Verizon advised its customers at Super Bowl LIX to avoid the stadium’s public Wi-Fi network and instead use its 5G for optimal performance, ushering in a new era for stadium experiences. Historically, however, Verizon has been the wireless carrier most likely to offload its customers to a stadium’s Wi-Fi network. Which, for any of us who have ever been at a game or a concert and unable to post our videos on social media, this is a dilemma we know All Too Well.
In short, here are a few reasons why 5G at large scale events is here to stay, and Wi-Fi, well, let’s just say, we are never ever getting back together.
Wi-Fi Glitch
After spending $100 million on network upgrades at Super Bowl LVII in 2023, Verizon noticed a glitch in the State Farm stadium Wi-Fi network. And in a master class in how to shake it off, Verizon pivoted and started moving customers from Wi-Fi and worked with Apple to build network algorithms that would help customers choose the best network—Verizon’s 5G network. These algorithms were introduced at Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas in 2024 (Figure 1).
That Wi-Fi glitch in 2023 was in large part due to the stadium Wi-Fi’s limited capacity for handling increasingly massive amounts of network traffic, while often relying on a mix of old and new equipment. Compared to 5G, Wi-Fi struggles with capacity, particularly in the uplink. In a stadium environment, most network traffic is user-generated by thousands of fans simultaneously uploading photos, videos, and live streams. This makes a robust uplink crucial. Traditional Wi-Fi networks often become congested under these circumstances due to limited spectrum availability and contention in the unlicensed bands.
Uploads Eclipsing Downloads
Verizon EVP Joseph Russo explained to SVG News in February 2025 that uploads eclipsed downloads during the Taylor Swift Eras Tour in New Orleans in October 2024. “You literally had 80,000 people live-streaming the whole concert. I don’t know who they’re streaming it to exactly, but it was the first time in my career—and I’ve been doing this for 30 years—when the uplink during the event was larger than the downlink.” Fans weren’t just consuming content; they were creating it.
Despite its capacity and uplink weaknesses, Super Bowl network traffic over Wi-Fi has shown steady growth through 2024 (See Figure 2), including a 10% increase from 2023 to 2024. That was the year that Verizon invested $100 million in 5G and promoted its use to customers at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas (Figure 1). When their customers transition in and out of third-party Wi-Fi networks, it becomes increasingly difficult for Verizon and other carriers to determine the number of customers they have and to control the quality of their experiences.
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| Figure 2: Growing Super Bowl data traffic, much of it not only consumed by fans but also produced by them, e.g., photos, live videos, and other content. Source: Stadium Tech Report, February 2024. |
The Great War: 5G vs. Wi-Fi
Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile continued to invest heavily in 5G infrastructure in and around the Caesar Stadium for Super Bowl LIX in 2025. Verizon and ATT generated more 5G traffic, 67 TB, than all the Wi-Fi traffic from all the carriers in Super Bowl LVIII. Information about network traffic from T-Mobile is unavailable.
Verizon: 509 Ultra-Wideband mmWave radios, 155 C-band radios, 42 MatSing antennas. Verizon claims its subscribers, who comprised 53% of attendees, benefited from 2.4x faster download and 4.8x faster upload speeds than the competition. Data usage in and around the stadium, 38.1 TB.
AT&T: Reinforced the stadium’s neutral-host DAS with 91 high-power 5G+ zones, 34 mmWave radios, and 255 low-power radios covering every corner. Data usage in and around the stadium, 29 TB, the highest-ever for AT&T at a Super Bowl.
T-Mobile: Upgraded indoor distributed antenna systems (iDAS) and all macro cell sites in areas surrounding the event.
These results show that Verizon and AT&T were both able to identify and characterize traffic over their own 5G networks and additionally exercise more control over those networks for the benefit of their customers.
The Critics
Critics question the carriers’ investment in permanent network upgrades for relatively infrequent NFL events. The fact is, their 5G upgrades benefit host cities, residents, businesses, and visitors long after the game ends. With the carriers owning the end-to-end experience from their network core to the end user devices/handsets, stadiums allow them to test next-generation 5G capabilities such as mmWave, network slicing and improved uplink so consumers and enterprises everywhere can benefit from superior performance.
For example, 5G mmWave in stadiums can leverage the following capabilities:
- Dynamic TDD network configuration: the deterministic nature of 5G mmWave coverage can be localized to specific areas inside the stadium. Carriers can adjust their uplink and downlink spectrum usage ratios where and when the need arises and not worry about bleeding out of the stadium.
- Targeted capacity zones: The directional and localized nature of 5G mmwave allows dedicating more bandwidth to sections of the stadium where data traffic is heaviest.
- Private/Neutral-Host Networks: For the same reasons as above, 5G mmWave’s allows the stadium owner or a third party to host multiple carriers on the same hardware without significant inter-carrier interference. Carriers and the stadium can define specific performance or security levels for different use cases (e.g., broadcast media vs. public Wi-Fi).
5G is the End Game
Super Bowls and other stadium events serve as an innovation laboratory—allowing carriers to understand evolving customer use cases and meet skyrocketing capacity demand. Verizon, AT&T, and T-mobile are investing in stadium 5G to deliver new and quality experiences from their own networks without transitioning through third party Wi-Fi networks.
We are in our 5G Era, and consumer and enterprise customers alike will benefit from the innovation that stadium events continue to inspire.