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Verizon spent $25 million on network upgrades before the 2024 NFL draft in Detroit
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The CSP added COWs, small cells and more macro towers
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Verizon said it started the upgrade process two years ago
NFL DRAFT, DETROIT, MICH. – Motown is more like Moo-town this week as Verizon deployed plenty of additional 5G radios to support the NFL Draft in downtown Detroit this week.
Expecting at least 500,000 people to attend the draft events in the city later this week, Scott Hubble, manger of business development and strategic planning at Verizon Wireless, said that the operator has been ramping up its radio assets in Motown over a couple of years to meet demand.
“We started this preparation roughly two years ago,” Hubble told Fierce. The prep started with permitting and fiber infrastructure, Hubble noted. Putting the icing on the football cake, the operator upgraded and installed more small cells downtown, as well as added extra event assets like a cell-on-wheels (COWs).
Football fans may be interested in the top draft picks but, here at Fierce, we were pretty interested in a new spherical antenna (pictured to the left) that provides Verizon the ability to slice up the coverage and provide maximum capacity to those 500,000 fans expected to descend on Detroit later this week, Hubble said.
The COW is a temporary asset but much of the street furniture that Verizon has deployed in Detroit will remain in the city after the draft.
“We spent roughly $25 million dollars in upgrades in the city of Detroit in the last year,” Hubble stated, adding that 98% of that spend is staying behind in the city.
Much of this new power will be in cell sites, both mini and macro, Hubble said. “We built 20 new small cells in the downtown, we upgraded 30 small cells with four times the capacity,” Hubble said.
"We also built five macro towers for coverage in and around downtown," he said, noting that the city of Detroit is a great partner.
Hubble said that the upgraded small cells have been fitted to support all the 5G antennas that Verizon uses: High-band millimeter wave, mid-band, C-band and low band. The bands are all aggregated, with mid-band taking over in areas where millimeter wave isn’t available.
Stay tuned for more tech insight from the NFL draft!