I took three almost-identical flagship Android phones to a crowded baseball stadium and pitted Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&T against each other for the entire game, all in real-world conditions: three same-size pieces of spectrum in one location. The goal was simple: lay bare 5G’s two biggest promises — speed and capacity — under the hammer of real crowd pressure.
I tested the download speeds at a few baselines a couple of miles from the stadium, then ran multiple speed tests and 2GB file downloads at numerous gates and fan zones outside the ballpark. The reaction was striking, sometimes surprising, and very instructive for anyone who’s heading to a game this season.
How I Tested in Game Conditions at the Stadium
I transferred the SIMs between three identical devices to control for any hardware prejudices and placed the same speed test app on each one for consistency’s sake, but there’s a CEO waiting in traffic somewhere who doesn’t want things marked top to bottom only to find a huge difference over time.
Extracted from “Your Network Is Now Theirs” in Bloomberg Businessweek by Brendan Greely, August 9, 2021. © 2021 by BLOOMBERG L.P. (Timed downloads of that 2GB 4K video from cloud storage might not be scientific rigor, but they give you a feel for throughput.)
I started with readings a few miles away for crowd-free baselines and made my way to several stadium entrances and an adjacent fan plaza. Crowds were what we used to call playoff-sized, and that’s exactly when network capacity is naked.
It’s also important to remember that stadiums usually have their networks backed by thick mixes of 5G mid-band (for more channel capacity), millimeter-wave (spritzes of ultra-fast connectivity but with short range), and distributed antenna systems. Nearby line-of-sight nodes can reach jaw-dropping speeds, but around a couple of corners and through a wall 5G rockets to a sputter. That variation is part of the tale.
The Peaks and the Pain by the Turnstiles
Straight out of the main gates, Verizon sent it swinging to come through with a top speed of just over 2.66 Gbps down, with AT&T following seconds behind in no way being slow at 1.29 Gbps down. Those are traditional millimeter-wave bursts: awesome if you’re in the beam. T-Mobile, meanwhile, occasionally failed to even connect at a busy gate and refused to start a test at one location — only to bounce back just minutes later at another gate.
Downloads in the real world told a similar story of whiplash. At one left-field entrance, a 2GB file did indeed complete in about 1:15 on AT&T, 3:55 on T-Mobile, and just under an hour more than that on Verizon. But at the fan plaza shortly after, T-Mobile and Verizon again both managed to have that identical file wrapped in about 3:15, while AT&T stalled out so hard I cut the stopwatch off at 12 minutes with the download still not done. Congestion, handoffs, and uplink limits can fluctuate results, minute to minute, when thousands of phones fight for the same airwaves.
Away from the Crowd, a Different Story Emerges
Take a step back from the crush and the networks go placid. A mile to a few miles from the park, T-Mobile consistently put up strong mid-band figures — usually in the 400–800 Mbps range — as Verizon and AT&T hovered around the 200–400 Mbps mark depending on where you were standing. In a last test 2.5 miles away, the 2GB download completed in about 1:00 on T-Mobile, 1:56 on Verizon, and 2:02 on AT&T. That’s like what we’ve seen nationally: when there isn’t sector collapse due to crowd load, T-Mobile’s mid-band (in this case it’s 2.5GHz) is a day-to-day speed powerhouse.
Those findings echo the results of larger market studies. Mid-band 5G has been identified as the sweet spot for fast, reliable everyday performance by independent testing firms, while millimeter-wave provides high but brief peaks. And researchers at Ookla, Opensignal, and RootMetrics have also pointed out how carriers’ deployments differ city by city — and that local engineering is just as important as spectrum.
Why 5G Remains Patchy in Stadiums, Even With Upgrades
Many are hard to bring online.
Stadiums test the end points of wireless design. You have tens of thousands of devices, high uplink demand (everyone is filming and posting), and busy radio conditions. Even on 5G, uplink is often the bottleneck. Millimeter-wave nodes can broadcast multigigabit downlink, but uplink and handoffs suffer as users move or as bodies block line of sight. Mid-band travels further but suffers from congestion when there aren’t enough sectors and backhaul. Neutral-host DAS vendors and carrier teams fight this physics with dense small cells, beamforming, and capacity planning — but it’s a moving target.
There’s also an architectural angle. Most networks are still 5G NSA (non-standalone), where 5G is anchored to LTE, which creates potential signaling/latency issues in dense coverage venues. Standalone 5G could prioritize various classes of traffic if the networks are sliced, but network slicing across an entire venue is not as widespread so far. Industry organizations such as 3GPP and CTIA drive home that real-world performance gains come from the troika of spectrum depth, site density, and strong fiber backhaul — not just radio logos on a scoreboard.
The Game Day Verdict: Which Carrier Won the Stadium Test
And for this test, Verizon is the clear winner: it has not only the fastest peak by a long shot — and didn’t see single-digit performance in my measurements — it demonstrated strong stability under strain, too.
AT&T put up some scorching bursts — like that 1.29 Gbps near the gate and an eye-blink-quick 2GB download — but it also suffered the nastiest slowdowns in its backend when a lot more people were milling around. T-Mobile was the behaviorally inconsistent one: great outside the park, sometimes unhelpful just beyond it, and unexpectedly potent again a few steps later.
Practical takeaway: if you’re going to a sold-out game, no carrier is going to act the same at every gate or minute. Download what you need before arriving, expect uplink-intensive work to lag, and rely on the venue’s Wi‑Fi if it qualifies as robust (many parks now boast Wi‑Fi 6/6E). Carriers are still refining the playbook for stadium coverage with plenty of C-band, n41, and even some targeted mmWave, but physics and fan behavior make perfection something like a lake to sail under a downtown bridge.
This was a sample rather than the national crown. Still, the trend is clear: multigig peaks are real, capacity pain is real, and perhaps the best network on your walk to the ballpark isn’t what you want it to be at the turnstile 10 minutes later.