We are less than 24 hours away from kickoff of Super Bowl 51. The teams held their last walk thru practice at NRG Stadium today. Reporter Wess Moore has been in Houston all week, and tells us what it’s been like.
We arrived Sunday. Monday through Thursday, it was pretty easy to get around. That has changed yesterday and today. They’re expecting close to a million fans around the convention center and the stadium. That means a lot of extra people on their phones.
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, Super Bowl fans are using their phones. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and people are on their phones capturing the moment. Verizon has been preparing three years for this demand. They’ve increased capacity 450 percent in the most congested areas like the convention center and stadium.
Jeannine Brew is Verizon’s PR manager. “What you’ll see is these towers, if you will, and what they do they allow for more bandwith to make certain everyone who wants to use their telephone, no matter what they want to do right, whether they want to send text messages, make calls, they want to Snapchat, Facebook Live, that they’re able to do what they want to do when they want to do it while they’re in town for the big game.”
Team members from all over the country are in Houston, monitoring the network 24/7 to make sure it is functioning at it’s very best.
Brew tells us, “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for many people to attend this event, whether they are going to the game or simply coming in to town to hang out, so it’s very important to Verizon to make certain our customers are able to do whatever they want to do.”
The Patriots and Falcons aren’t the only teams putting in hard work this week.
Verizon expects ten plus terabytes to be used.
To put that in perspective, one terabyte equals 500 downloads of Netflix movies.
