AT&T: We did fine at the Super Bowl, but give us more spectrum

AT&T had quite the Super Bowl. At the game AT&T’s networks carried 215 GB of traffic, placed 74,204 phone calls and transmitted 722,296 SMS messages. AT&T reported no problems in handling the traffic and had, in fact, been prepping for game day by adding permanent and temporary capacity. But in what is now becoming a common refrain, AT&T used the event to lobby regulators for more spectrum.

It’s a bit strange for AT&T to use a one-off event as justification for more licenses, since a big annual sporting event is exactly the type of scenario where more spectrum wouldn’t help. Operators scale network capacity to meet average peak demands. If carriers built their networks nationwide to handle Super Bowl-levels of traffic, they would go broke, regardless of whether they had the spectrum to do so. If AT&T had permanently doubled its normal peak capacity in Indianapolis for the game, that bandwidth would have sat their idle for the remaining 364 days.