February 2019

This weekend, hundreds of millions of eyeballs will be drawn to Atlanta's brand-new Mercedes-Benz Stadium for Super Bowl 53. The event isn't just a chance to watch the Patriots win yet again; it's also a live spectacle that can draw over a million visitors into a small area, stressing the communications infrastructure like almost nothing else. 

To monitor how operators are handling the peak load, Tutela is monitoring network quality tests from its crowdsourced database in the area surrounding the stadium, and uploading the results into the dashboard below. We'll be updating the results live before and during the event, and you can follow along to see how networks handle the traffic here. 

Tutela collects billions of measurements from millions of devices globally every day, but for this event, we're just focusing on a handful of network quality metrics that best reflect how the networks are dealing with the congestion. 

As well as monitoring the underlying network quality measurements (download speed, upload speed, latency, and signal strength), we're also keeping a close eye on consistent quality, Tutela's metric for whether a wireless connection is good enough for users to use demanding apps like HD video calling, video-focused social networking (like Snapchat), or stream HD replays of the action. 

When dealing with massive crowds, the challenge for network operators is making sure that everyone has a good-enough connection – which is quite different than, say, achieving triple-digit download speeds when the network isn't loaded. 

Our dashboard will be live for the days and hours leading up to the event, and we'll have a full post-mortem of how all the networks performed available shortly after the final whistle.