Study: Fenway Park Cell Service Isn’t So Bad
For any number of reasons, you should not be on your phone while at Fenway Park: the sights, the sounds, an errant foul ball, the price of admission. But with the 2015 Red Sox as uninspiring as they are, no one could begrudge you the occasional glance at Twitter. With thousands of Sox fans checking their phones, service might seem a tad sluggish.
At a June 7 matchup between the Sox and the Oakland A’s, independent wireless benchmarking firm Global Wireless Solutions (GWS) collected data for cell carriers AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint at America’s most beloved ballpark, and determined how long it takes to complete simple tasks before, during, and after the game.
Image via GWS
“During the game when the crowd was likely to be active on their mobile data networks, tasks in general showed some signs of slowing down,” GWS said in a release. “Although, upload speeds remained fairly consistent for fans looking to post photos and upload videos from the stadium.”
To conduct the study, a trained engineer used a Doc Brown-esque contraption known as a Rohde & Schwarz’s SwissQual QualiPoc Freerider connected to Samsung Galaxy S5 smartphones to gather data on the four biggest data networks.
“Once broken down, the four major carriers performed well in establishing strong networks to connect Fenway Park’s patrons with AT&T showing the highest mean throughputs for the 4MB file upload tasks both before and after the game. Verizon, on the other hand netted the highest mean throughputs for download tasks,” GWS said.
T-Mobile users, meanwhile, browse Facebook and Instagram the fastest during the game. Any idea what cell carrier Pablo Sandoval uses?
