On June 29^th, 2026, at the annual Sports & Entertainment Alliance for Technology (SEAT) Conference I presented to a cross section of this industry, including sports clubs, solutions providers, 3PO’s, wireless carriers, and sports venue consultants.  The session was titled Venue Wireless RETHINK – a MASTERCLASS.  While many of these topics could be controversial among different attendees, I was pleasantly surprised to see a cross-section of this industry response very positively and join in the idea that it is time for a rethink in this industry and the approach to selecting and delivering cellular wireless infrastructure.

Season 1 : Episode 5 – Spectrum – The Foundation

This Episode

Skating to where the puck will be (thank you, Gretzky) we see that the shift in technology is significantly changing the needs of a stadium wireless. To enable wireless naturally you need air, or more aptly spectrum, that you can transmit over.  The entire area of technology and the business of spectrum ownership is fascinating and an area that is healthy to understand in venue wireless strategy planning – so of course you should be thinking, where is the puck going to be! This episode will dig into some of this, but to be honest – it only scratches the surface.

Why is Looking at Spectrum Important?

Simply put, without spectrum, there is no wireless.  One could easily conclude that the ownership of spectrum by a carrier (mobile wireless operator) — at least by FCC terms — is the single most important asset it has.  The amount of spend on spectrum is substantial, and when considering that the T-Mobile acquisition of Sprint is arguably about access to Sprint’s spectrum, the total spend is over $152 billion over the past 10 years.

The Sprint merger ($40.8B, per T-Mobile’s SEC 10-K) is by far the single largest capital event in the chart — it alone exceeds everything AT&T spent on spectrum in the entire decade. In the chart below, the shaded green band between the dashed and solid T-Mobile lines represents the Sprint premium visually.

Verizon’s C-band gamble in 2021 ($45.5B) is the largest single auction spend in U.S. history and is what drives them to $52.6B cumulative. They deliberately sat out the 3.45 GHz auction and kept their 2026 AWS-3 spend targeted — just filling high-value urban gaps.

AT&T has been the most consistent but never dominant bidder participating across every auction window but never betting the house on any single one. Their 3.45 GHz spend ($9.1B in 2022) was their biggest single swing.

On an auctions-only basis (stripping Sprint), T-Mobile is the smallest spender of the three at $22.2B — reflecting their strategy of acquiring spectrum through the merger rather than competing aggressively at auction.

AT&T is the most consistent acquirer, buying in every major auction, but never dominant in any single one. Their 3.45 GHz win (40 MHz, $9.1B) was their biggest mid-band move.

How Does Spectrum Equate to Speed (Megabits or Gigabits per Second)?

Getting data bits into a wireless transmission is a long-time science.  One of the well-known theorems on this is the Shannon-Hartley theorem (often referred to as just Shannon).  It defines how to determine the amount of error-free data that can be put into a wireless transmission. The mathematical equation looks like this:

C=W log₂(1+S/N)

Shannon showed that channel capacity (C) – the achievable data rate in bits/s – is proportional to channel bandwidth (W) and logarithmically dependent on the Signal to Noise ratio (S/N).  When you speak with RF people you will hear and see terms like RSRP and SINR.  They are really talking about the amount of usable signal they can create in your venue for moving data over. At its roots is this calculation.

As an exercise, I asked Claude to create a simple calculator – check it out!. When you use certain parameters to get a feel for the speed you can get information like that in the example below. Note that this assumes 4 layers, or 4X4 MIMO connection, 100MHz of spectrum capacity (the standard channel bandwidth for things like C-Band), and expected noise of a stadium. Note, there are many calculators and a lot more that can go into this – so that this as an example – not as the purist’s calculation.

The 4G to 5G Technology Bandwidth

The world of LTE is one of 20 MHz channels. The world of 5G (New Radio or NR) is one of 100 MHz channels. Multiple channels can be combined, so it is not uncommon to have two 20 MHz LTE combined, and in 5G a 100 MHz channel combined with an 80 MHz (due to certain total available spectrum) – for simplicity take this as a shift from 40 to 180, or 4.5 times the capacity possible. Today, stadium solutions utilize many different bands, but arguably the future state will only need a select few bands to achieve the goals.

Non-Standalone 5G to Standalone 5G

It is often misunderstood that a 5G symbol on your phone still means today that behind the scenes the connection up to the network (uplink) and all phone controls are still 4G-based, only the downlink session is 5G (at least for some carriers).  This is good for download capacity but doesn’t change the upload. More importantly, it means systems need both 4G and 5G bands support to operate. This is known as Non-Standalone (NSA). What’s changing? Within the next few years, most networks and their mobile phones will use 5G in both directions, resulting in a 100% 5G connection for both uplink and downlink.  You will hear of this as “5G Stand Alone” or “5G SA”.

The Effect and Advancements of MIMO – Massive MIMO

I won’t serve its complexity justice here, but to keep it as simple as possible, MIMO equals multiple wireless connection paths using the same frequency but on different antennas that are separated spatially and deliver the signal at a different angle (so to speak).  As a result, the mobile phone can essentially double the throughput within the same frequency channels for each MIMO “path”.

For example, 2X2 is double, 4X4 is quadruple. However, each MIMO antenna takes its own amplifier to send the signal through the air, thus more complexity, more power required, etc.  For a permanently mounted and powered antenna, using more power to transmit towards a mobile phone is easier to accomplish.  When a phone wants to transmit more paths it consumes more power and thus has an impact on battery life – a constant battle for phone users.

Most stadium solutions are 2×2 MIMO (two paths). However, given the nature of a stadium bowl, the devices often cannot often take advantage of this capability. Estimates and tests show that less than 35% of the time a mobile may be in 2X2 MIMO mode, which is a standard implementation on a DAS or passive antenna type system.

MIMO has taken on even more innovation through what is known as Massive MIMO and Multi-User MIMO capabilities. These approaches allow even greater reuse of the same spectrum, not just increasing performance per user but also enabling the spectrum to be shared more efficiently for greater overall utilization.

Inventions known as Massive MIMO use many different antennas and essentially can derive many different beams (many MIMO paths). These many MIMO paths can be used to deliver multiple paths more effectively, across more mobile phones, thus increasing the throughput – especially in the uplink path which is becoming increasingly more important.

These types of antennas, however, are not simple passive designs. They incorporate processing and intelligence to change the beams in a manner that optimizes the delivery of these beams to mobile devices it sees. These changes happen in microseconds constantly adapting. As a result, these types of antennas cannot connect to a DAS system. Instead, they connect directly to the cellular signal processors (called Basebands) over fiber optic connections.

To better understand the merits, you can think of a massive MIMO system in the following image and four contexts: