WrestleMania XXXI Attendees Used 4.5 TB of WiFi Data at Levi’s Stadium

WrestleMania XXXI already broke the attendance record at Levi’s Stadium — the home of the San Francisco 49ers. This is a factor of, well, it being WrestleMania and all, as well as the fact the comparatively diminutive size of a wrestling ring allows for a LOT of seats to be placed on field level. Another, much nerdier record was also broken during that event. The record WiFi usage at Levi’s Stadium, previously set at 3.3 terabytes during the 49ers 2014 home opener, was choke-slammed into oblivion. According to 49ers officials, WrestleMania attendees sucked down 4.5 terabytes of data during the event in early April.

As Mobile Sports Report mentions, this record did not come without a conscious effort to beef up infrastructure. Since the stadium was not built to handle that kind of traffic from users on the actual field of play, 69 additional access points were temporarily installed to accommodate fans. Extra WiFi coverage was also added to the temporary seating areas that were added for the massive outdoor event.

I want to reiterate that these numbers were for WiFi alone, and do not reflect traffic over standard cellular signals. That is not only a massive amount of data, it signifies a massive amount of users that connected to the stadium WiFi. Think of how many Tweets and Facebook posts it would take to comprise 4.5 terabytes of data — it’s staggering.

Being in a technology epicenter certainly put pressure on stadium workers to make sure the pipes were big enough to handle all the traffic. But there are other factors in play as well. Levi’s Stadium is the site for Super Bowl 50 in February. No offense to the WWE, but if any event warrants the need for flawless and high-powered Internet access, it’s the biggest event in sports. We saw that six terabytes of data were consumed during the college football championship. While that’s a big event in and of itself, it’s still not the Super Bowl. I imagine that WrestleMania acted as a bit of a test run for those in charge of Levi’s Stadium’s bits and bytes. According to the 49ers, the stress tests went smoothly. We’ll see how it really shakes out in 10 months, but at least WWE fans were able to post all the photos and video of ring entrances and belt hoisting that they required.

(Image via Andrew Beckman)