Kansas City Royals score with jump in postseason stadium Wi-Fi and DAS traffic

If you need a reason to justify Wi-Fi network installs or improvements in your stadium, here’s an optimistic rationale: If your team makes it to the playoffs and the championship, you can expect a big surge in postseason wireless traffic.

That idea was proven again this fall by the Kansas City Royals, who racked up big postseason Wi-Fi and DAS traffic numbers at Kauffman Stadium during their march to the 2015 World Series championship, including a 3.066 terabyte night on the Wi-Fi network for Game 1 of the World Series. That’s a 1 TB jump from last season, when Kansas City saw 2+ TB of Wi-Fi traffic during Game 7 of the 2014 World Series.

According to numbers provided by Brian Himstedt, senior director of information systems for the Royals, the Kauffman Stadium Wi-Fi network saw an average of 1.9 TB of aggregate throughput for the eight home games Kansas City hosted in the playoffs.

The average peak user count over those games was 11,850, with a high peak of 13,900 during Game 2 of the World Series. The stadium’s capacity for the postseason games, Himstedt said, was 40,500.

The postseason Wi-Fi traffic, Himstedt said, was approximately 34 percent upload and 66 percent download. During the regular season, the Kauffman Wi-Fi network had upload/download averages of 22 percent and 78 percent respectively, meaning that during the playoffs fans were probably more busy sharing information than obtaining it.

Overall, the postseason Wi-Fi numbers were much larger than the Royals’ regular-season stats, Himstedt said. Here are some of the regular-season stats during a summer that saw the network serve more than 180,500 unique clients on the Wi-Fi network:

— Average throughput per game: 625 GB
— High throughput, single game: 1.05 TB (Sept. 26)
— Average peak concurrent users per game: 5,150
— High peak concurrent users, single game: 7,500 (Opening Day, April 6)

The average attendance of Kauffman Stadium during the regular season was 33,900, Himstedt said.

Sprint DAS numbers also jump

And while the DAS at Kauffman Stadium is still awaiting full participation by all of the top wireless carriers, hometown favorite Sprint was active on the new system deployed by Advanced RF Technologies before the start of the season, and according to Sprint there were huge increases in DAS traffic compared to 2014.

Here are some DAS numbers from Sprint about the playoff traffic at Kauffman Stadium:

— Total tonnage for the 2015 eight game post-season was 2.6 terabytes

— Average tonnage per post-season game increased 4,000% in 2015 compared to 2014

— Sprint fans talked on their phones a total of 178,954 minutes in the post-season

— LTE connection rates for the 2015 post-season improved by approximately 40% compared to 2014

According to Sprint, the DAS supported all the frequencies used by Sprint devices, including the 1.9GHz, 2.5GHz and 800MHz bands.