Best-in-class stadium experience: Corning, Qualcomm win Small Cell Forum award for deployment at the Big Game
By Jason Grizzi
Published: May 25, 2022
As Los Angeles, California prepared for the football league’s Big Game, they needed the most advanced technology to deliver a best-in-class fan experience. Ensuring ubiquitous cellular coverage and capacity at a large scale was critical.
That’s why they turned to Corning for mobile connectivity support. The Corning solution powered by the Qualcomm® FSM100 5G RAN Platform delivered.
This event was held at the newest sports and entertainment complex in the United States and was one of the first large scale, high-density deployments of 5G technology.
This deployment builds on an award-winning collaboration between Corning and Qualcomm Technologies: 2021 SCF Small Cell Award winning submission “Indoor 5G mmWave – Pandemic Adventures”.
This deployment delivered reliable 5G with consistent 1Gbps + coverage and capacity in the smallest of spaces at the new Los Angeles stadium, the state-of-the-art sports and entertainment complex supporting an average of more than 70,000 attendees for major events, like the Big Game in February 2022.
Multiple operators wanted to offer ubiquitous 5G mmWave coverage and capacity on both 28GHz & 39GHz throughout the venue, to enable a best-in-class mobile experience for their users. This deployment is the largest of its kind to date and posed interesting new technology challenges. Traditional macro radios covered the bowl seating section. But to expand the coverage in a cost-effective scalable manner, a smaller-form-factor, lower-power radio was required to cover the thousands of users in the more than 120 high-profile suites and bungalow seating areas along with multiple VIP bars along the concourse and a smaller convert venue to ensure those small areas received best-in-class 5G gigabit-plus service.
This innovative approach involved Corning’s small form factor and scalable solution, and allowed for multiple operators to quickly deploy over 120 radios each in a matter of weeks while maintaining minimal size/power impact to the MDF/IDFs distributed throughout the stadium. This occurred while supporting a large-scale interoperability of X2 EN-DC from multiple traditional macro vendors as the LTE anchor to Corning’s gNBs. Corning’s unique beamforming codebooks designed for indoor-specific use cases allow operators to optimize coverage and capacity for both ceiling and wall mount deployments out of the same unit by simple software modifications that can be unique to each radio and applied in seconds. To manage thermals of a small form factor radio pushing over a gigabit of traffic, Corning has implemented industry leading software-based control algorithms to ensure performance without any thermal impact to the device or its capabilities.
Delivering mmWave performance while maintaining size, power efficiency and cost effectiveness are at the heart of this deployment. To address this, Corning is utilizing the Qualcomm FSM100 5G RAN Platform, designed for cost-effective and scalable indoor deployments. The solution from Qualcomm Technologies was the 2019 Outstanding Innovation in Small Cell Technology or Architecture award winner for “mmWave Coverage with 5G Innovation Supporting Small, Scalable and Cost-Effective Infrastructure”. For this deployment, Corning is harnessing these award-winning capabilities in a dense 5G mmWave scenario for powerful and immersive user experiences.
The ultimate fan experience with uninterrupted cellular connectivity was achieved due to this innovative large scale commercial deployment. Many users for the first time experienced consistent 1Gbps + coverage and capacity in the smallest of spaces, suites being less than 200 square feet. The ability for any and all users to experience live streaming, utilize social media, and other game specific apps set a new standard for sports and entertainment events.
To read more about our work in large public venues, click here.
