Sprint noted in a press release on Monday, that their customers consumed nearly 5TB of data in and around the NRG Stadium in Houston, which hosted the Super Bowl on Sunday. That’s about three times the amount of data consumed at last year’s big event at Levi Stadium in the Bay Area. And that’s about 8-times more than the data consumed at the University of Phoenix Stadium in 2015, in Phoenix. This means that not only are there more people using Sprint’s network to share things on social media, upload videos and such, but the capacity is at a point where customers are actually able to do these things.
Network capacity was something that all four of the major carriers talked up ahead of the big game this past weekend, and results that T-Mobile boasted earlier today showed that they narrowly beat Sprint in average upload and download speeds, but the two smallest carriers were the fastest in Houston. Sprint hit a peak speed of about 124Mbps download, which is pretty incredible and was done right outside of the Verizon suite. Additionally, they hit 85Mbps in the stadium when the game went to Overtime. To say that Sprint held up to the demand for their network would be an understatement. They did extremely well during the game. A big part of these speeds were the 2.5GHz Small Cells that the carrier deployed within the stadium, to help handle the extra capacity that their network would see this past Sunday.
While their network took center stage at the Super Bowl, so did their Super Bowl Commercial which was targeting Verizon – something that T-Mobile also did in their commercials. Sprint’s commercial consisted of a man with his kids attempting to make everyone think he had been killed, so he could get out of paying his Verizon bill which had loads of overage fees. It was Sprint’s way of telling customers to come over to the yellow carrier and enjoy unlimited data – which is just $50/month for a single line right now. And with Sprint you won’t need to worry about overage speeds. Of course, Verizon hit back on Twitter after their ad aired. Sprint had a pretty good Super Bowl and really showed the country that their network has vastly improved over the past few years, and it’s only going to get better.