Verizon upgrades the 5G network for the Indy 500, promises speeds over 1.0Gbps at the track | Infinium-tech
The annual Indy 500 race is coming – it’s taking place this Sunday (May 24) and a huge crowd is expected to turn out to watch the racing live at this famous track. Last year, around 350,000 people came to the track and shared 61 TB of data over their mobile connections.
This year, Verizon has spent months getting its 5G infrastructure on track and has upgraded radio hardware to deliver a 400% increase in bandwidth.
The carrier thought things over to ensure a good experience from the beginning – since paper tickets are mostly a thing of the past, all you have to do is load a digital ticket onto your phone. This is not an easy task when hundreds of thousands of people also want to come inside. So, Verizon installed 33 special small cells at main entrances to speed things up.
The track – which is spread over 559 acres of land (2.3 square kilometres) – is now equipped with 240 5G mmWave nodes. Additionally, 219 high-powered antennas were added and local cell towers were upgraded to the latest 5G standards.
Real-world testing ahead of the event showed that the local network could reach download speeds in excess of 1Gbps thanks to those mmWave nodes – and they could go up to 2.5Gbps under the right conditions.
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