The annual Indy 500 race is coming up – it’s happening this Sunday (May 24) and the legendary track expects massive crowds to gather to watch the racing live. Last year, around 350,000 people showed up at the track and shared a whopping 61TB of data over their mobile connections.
This year, Verizon has spent months preparing the 5G infrastructure at the track and it has upgraded the radio hardware to deliver a 400% increase in bandwidth.
The carrier thought things through to ensure a good experience from the start – since paper tickets are mostly a thing of the past, you need to load a digital ticket on your phone. That’s not an easy task when there are hundreds of thousands of people who also want to get in. So, Verizon set up 33 specialized small cells at the main gates to speed things up.
The track – which is spread across 559 acres of land (2.3 square kilometers) – is now dotted with 240 5G mmWave nodes. Also, 219 high-capacity antennas were added and local cell towers were upgraded to the latest 5G standards.
Real-world testing before the event has shown that the local network can reach download speeds over 1 Gbps thanks to those mmWave nodes – and they can go as high as 2.5Gbps in the right conditions.