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Verizon deploys temporary 4G and 5G assets to support the Preakness
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The operator has already rolled out more C-band and mmWave 5G in Baltimore
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The company's network handled nearly 50 Gbps of additional data at 2023 race
Ready to lay down some greenbacks for the horses this Saturday?
With the Preakness stakes in Baltimore this weekend, even some of us geeky tech journos have been known to have a flutter on the ponies. Horses like Mystik Dan and Catching Freedom are among the favorites for this Saturday’s race at Pimlico.
We doubt you’ll be spending as much as Verizon on supporting the sport of kings. As it did for the National Football League Draft earlier this year, Verizon has rolled out what it calls “temp assets” to support the crowds at the second leg of horse racing’s Triple Crown, as well as mid-band C-band (3.7 GHz to 4.2 GHz) and high-band millimeter wave (28 GHz and 39 GHz) around Baltimore.
“The Preakness is always a huge event for us. Two weeks after the Kentucky Derby, it’s the one that sets the winner up for Triple Crown,” Brian Dunn, senior director of network operations at Verizon told Fierce in an interview. “We’ve done a very good job adding the C-band 5G and a lot of millimeter wave [mmWave] throughout Baltimore, the city is pretty well covered."
The horse’s MEOW?
Dunn described some of the assets added around the race track to boost its network capacity. “We have the temp asset, the MEOW, the big one, that is set in the infield. That actually has some upgrades that we did to it at the beginning of this year to support our events around the country. We’ve added C-band to it.” he said.
The MEOW (MatSing Equipment on Wheels) is basically a mobile network with a large antenna that will bolster 5G capacity available to race-goers. Opensignal found that C-band increased Verizon’s national 5G speeds 26.7% after the band was launched in Spring 2022, and the mobile network will improve the speed and coverage available to spectators on the turf.
Speeds ‘n’ feeds
Dunn said that at the 2023 event — before the most recent improvements to its assets — Verizon handled almost 50 gigabits of data and over 55 million connections in 12 hours on its temp assets at the Preakness. “That’s that a huge amount of data in 12 hours to move,” Dunn noted.
Dunn said Verizon handled about 4.9 million connections at peak times in the 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. period of the race last year. The network handled 1.6 million to 1.7 million calls over the 4G LTE network at the 2023 race.
“That keeps us coming back,” Dunn said. “You can build your network but with that type of volume for an event, you’re always going to need that extra capacity there.”