How Optus Keeps Your Phone Working When 52,000 Fans Turn Up at Once

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

When a whole city of people moves into one location that’s normally empty there’s a lot that goes on behind the scenes to make sure everything just works. And that’s true of our telco networks when it comes to major sporting stadiums. This last few days I’ve spent time at Optus Stadium looking behind the scenes at things like Network Slicing and checking out just how much data we’re all chewing through at a big game.

We were given a behind the scenes look at a range of facilities around Optus Stadium which ensure fans are safe at all times, that the lights and entertainment all work in sync and generally that a big show just runs smoothly.

Preparing the Optus Network inside a Stadium

Optus Executive General Manager – Networks Transformation & AIOps Paul Milford also pointed out the staggering number of antennas setup for the Optus Mobile coverage, right across the stadium. What’s interesting is how they set these up not just to flood the stadium with coverage, but to be very specific about how and where that coverage is positioned.

Think of a torch beam; you point it at a spot you want there to be light. Bring in another torch and you point that at the next spot, trying not to overlap too much because you’re providing too much light to those edges but also wasting a bit of space given you want to use the torches efficiently to light the area.

In mobile terms, it’s about that directional aim for the mobile signal, but also how many you place to minimise the “noise” coming from the area. Basically you want more beams of signal, at a lower strength so the people’s phones in that area aren’t “shouting” for coverage, and creating that noise and thus congestion.

Optus Stadium is split into some 28 different areas, all like pieces of a pie, allowing the signal to be shared specifically, and even based on usage and congestion in one area.

Behind it all is a fibre network connecting everything back to the core network so there are no bottlenecks at all.

Data hungry football fans flood the Optus network

During one of the three blockbuster Italian football games on in Perth this week, Optus measured some really interesting usage patterns.

There were 52,000 people at the game, which – is like a small city of people just turning up to what is otherwise an empty stadium.

Here’s the Optus network graph of that night:

While there’s some key moments there to unpack, I find the before and after moments really interesting. See how slow and steady the attendance at the stadium grows?

Yet at the end of the game – boom, everyone’s gone. Amazing how the way we use our phones directly reflects the movement of people through such a big precinct for an event like this.

Looking at just the Optus Mobile users at that event, fans consumed 2.4 TB of mobile data! That’s like 625,000 photos and we all know that photos are unlikely to be the primary use case. We’re all becoming “mini broadcasters” with video being key, and mobile uploads at the AC Milan vs Inter Milan game more than double those at a comparable AFL game.

During the match 15% of the crowd remained actively engaged on social media, with Instagram topping the charts as the most used platform of the night, followed by Snapchat, Facebook and TikTok.

Overall data usage was 30% higher than the West Coast Eagles v Western Bulldogs match at Optus Stadium last month.

The most interesting, perhaps surprising stat? 10,960 voice calls were made during the event, more than double that of recent AFL games.

That’s all the things you’d expect are happening on our mobile networks.

What is Network Slicing?

But Optus also continues to look at our reliance on mobile and its impact across its network. Last night, they continued working on trials of what’s called “network slicing” – using the same network hardware to create segments of usage on that same network.

This was possible with 4G, but it’s far better when operating on 5G Standalone technology.

The best example I can give is what Optus was demonstrating last night, Point of Sale.

We’re all oblivious to the technology and process of making a payment at a cashier. While we just tap, wait for the beep, then go, that also involves a network communication.

That little point of sale terminal needs to communicate with the bank to approve – or not – the transaction.

But what if that’s happening during one of the most amazing moments of the game in the stadium. A Goal? What if at that point in time you’ve got people live-streaming, uploading and calling?

That congestion might mean what was normally a 2-3 second transaction time, might stretch out to double. Doesn’t sound like much but across hundreds of stores and terminals, that could delay a lot of people, we’re all about efficiency here folks!

So, Optus created a “slice” of their network.

Enabled just for a few machines, this meant those machines had priority on the network.

The most visual example of this was a simple demonstration of two phones identical, both on the Optus Network but one of their SIMs was enabled on that “Network Slice”, so it got some priority and less congestion, this led to a faster speed in a side by side download inside a packed stadium.

There’s enormous potential for this technology. This retail example is just one use case, others include emergency services ensuring bandwidth when it matters most

Trevor Long travelled to Perth as a guest of Optus including producing a special sponsored edition of Two Blokes Talking Tech