Connectivity kicks in for Sunderland at the Stadium of Light

Details and demos

Looking at the specific technical and design details of the deployment, Boldyn says it was firmly committed to the Neutral Host in Building (NHIB) concept as part of the Joint Operators Technical Specification (JOTS) forum, an initiative designed to specify the performance, coverage and reliability of wireless systems that are shared by UK mobile operators.

The JOTS NHIB specs set out all of the technical requirements for shared in-building solutions using small-cell base stations, while the JOTS DAS specification lists the technical requirements for all types of third-party, in-building solutions based on distributed antenna system solutions.

To ensure “ubiquitous” coverage across the venues. Boldyn says it designed the solution with several key considerations. In the Stadium of Light, looking at seating and indoor area, there were 16 DAS sectors for the seating bowl to cater for 48,000 users with an average of 3,000 per sector.

Indoor areas such as the basement, concourses, suites and hospitality areas will share the same 16 seating bowl sectors. Four DAS sectors will enable pitch coverage during events such as concerts and four DAS sectors will be dedicated to cover carparks on opposing sides of the ground.

The deployment timeline began in August 2024 with a RAN testing and evaluation stage encompassing design, security and mobilisation. Design was approved in January 2024 and procurement ended in February 2024, closing the DAS design and mobilisation phase.

The DAS installation in the stadium then began, finishing in December 2024. DAS testing followed, with a pilot light up in February 2025 and a full stadium light up a month later. All demo and testing ended in April 2025 with full handover and acceptance scheduled for June 2025.

The evaluation phase saw legacy benchmarking in March 2025 with the VMO2 system going live in mid-March 2025. At the end of the month, the new comms system was used for its first live game. Post-live experience testing and demo testing events took place in April 2025, with the final part of the demo testing completed in the first week of May.

‘Moments that matter’

VMO2 is in the middle of a UK-wide £700m network transformation programme designed to enhance reliability, speed and coverage on its network for “a step change” in performance to help deliver the “best possible” experience for customers. In the words of the firm’s director of mobile access engineering, Rob Joyce, it also hopes to improve connectivity in places and times that the company classes as “moments that matter”.

Joyce adds that a key aspect of connectivity in sports stadiums is you don’t get the typical density of users anywhere else, and that everybody in a stadium typically reaches for their phone at some time.

He says that as an operator and before its recent merger, the O2 mobile company has had a legacy of connecting stadiums – such as its own O2 arena in London, along with Twickenham, the home of English rugby – with the simple core aim of giving customers, especially in large experience-type events, the best coverage that it can give them. The job for O2, he believes, is not about sports per se, it’s all about events.

For the Sunderland project, O2 took advantage of its close relationship with Boldyn, with Joyce stating that the process was aided by carrying out work according to JOTS guidelines.

“We as an industry defined JOTS so any neutral host [such as] Boldyn can take it and build to our requirements,” he says. “That includes the spectrum that we need, the type of technology that we use – 2G, 3G, 4G, 5G. In terms of this stadium, because we built Twickenham ourselves, we would have given Boldyn an idea of what we think how many people each antenna should cover. The rule of thumb is anywhere between 1,000 and 2,500 people.”

Another key defining factor in designing the network was the devices used by spectators. Over half of VMO2’s mobile subscribers now have a 5G handset so the amount of traffic that comes from handsets is mainly 5G, and 5G users tend to have new phones and generate more traffic. This 50% of the base on 5G generates well over 50% of traffic, meaning that most of VMO2’s mobile deployments are heavily biased towards 5G networks to which the operator is refarming most of its spectrum.

In early April 2025, VMO2’s specialist engineers versed in the art of JOTS deployment in sports stadiums were working through analysis of the network for the first live game at the end of March.

This showed that the network was capable of handling communications running at up to a gigabit per second across the stadium at peak on 5G networks for VMO2 customers.

A throughput of 5Mbps is what VMO2 would class as its “hygiene factor” – the minimum to support streaming video or a video call. Joyce states that no users in the stadium during the test game on 29 March against Millwall, which attracted 41,762 spectators, got anything near below 5Mbps even at the half-time interval, which is traditionally a time when fans hit their phones.

Revealing some details of usage, Joyce says: “We looked at the stats, and [there were] not a lot of voice calls made during the match – most people are either doing WhatsApp or video streaming. But again, the voice calls success rate was in the high 99s [percentage].

“We have been involved in the design [of the stadium network], but we’re now involved in going through [usage] with a fine-tooth comb. That’s why we saw, for example, some glitches on some sectors at the weekend – not service affecting, but certainly we’re looking at the stats so we know why they glitched as they did.

“We’ve not got into the applications [used]; we’ve only looked so far at the amount of traffic. But it was constant throughout the game, from the people coming into the stadium to them leaving. [The network] was running hot constantly.

“The average figure of what the system was delivering was around about 200Mbps constant. It’ll peak up to a gig, but solidly for traffic and people coming on, downloading video, or sending it. On average ,we were seeing…a decent throughput. If you times that by the number of hours that people were in the stadium, then you’re getting close to like a terabyte of data being shifted during these matches.”

Detailed analysis from the Sunderland versus Millwall game using SpeedTest benchmarks showed that the average downlink speed throughput to fans was 210Mbps, with an average uplink of 37.414Mbps. Maximum downlink speed measured was 340Mbps and maximum uplink was 51.51Mbps. As far as latency was concerned, the average ping time was 46.114ms (milliseconds) and a maximum of 69.761ms.

Maintaining quality

Joyce emphasises the need for partnerships to make deployments such as the one at Stadium of Light work. Sports associations fundamentally need to work with operators and solutions partners such as Boldyn. The typical cost of stadium deployments is “immense”, he adds.

“You’re not going to have a single operator really wanting to put its hand in the pocket and do it themselves,” he says. “With this approach, it’s a joint operator spec. It’s built for all four operators.

“We know that when we go on there, we’ll get the capacity we need. We’ve got a reputation with our Priority Moments, and so on, of covering large fan bases, whether they’re in the O2 arena or an arena somewhere else or a football stadium. That’s why we’re doing it.

“From a commercial point of view, do we get any more money from our subscribers because we’ve done this? Probably not – they expect it from us. So, I think we’re doing [these deployments] because they expect it from us. But also, if you don’t do it, and the competition does, when you and I are at the stadium and you’re streaming video and I’m not, I’ll ask you which provider you are on.”

Our customers don’t care about bandwidth. They just care about YouTube working. Our challenge is to make sure that the network we provide works

Another key part of the story is regarding the access points used on the project and customer equipment in general, which has evolved greatly over the recent past. Evolving, more importantly, to being a lot more cost-effective, as well as offering performance upgrades.

“Once upon a time, when you did a stadium, all you needed to worry about was voice and text, so you put in one antenna at the end and it covered the whole [stadium] bowl, and that would be more than enough, even at 900MHz GSM, for all the voice and all the text that used to happen.

“Things have changed, so we’ve now got more frequency bands that we have to deploy, so we need cleverer antennas. People tend to use data more than they use voice [as seen in the first live game]. What used to happen is that, if you had a DAS, the operators would build their base stations and they would transmit the RF signal, and then they used to try to pipe that around the stadium with feeders. And if the feeders didn’t work, you lost things. So, you had kilowatts of energy coming out of these RF feeders leading around the stadium.”

The new neutral host setup is a lot more energy efficient, using VMO2 fibre for a backhaul interface into the cloud, allowing Boldyn to take signals to RF heads installed across the stadium that transmit radio from just behind the antennas. Sunderland has therefore shrunk its hardware footprint by 87% while reducing the power from between 60% and 70%.

If Sunderland’s ultimate sporting goal is to reach the Premier League, then Joyce’s is maintaining the quality of service with the network at the Stadium of Light.

“It’s coverage first, then capacity and then capability,” he says. “There’s nothing worse than not having signal, so you need adequate capacity for the service that you’re giving.

“The next thing we want to be doing is this hygiene factor of 5Mbps … you need to have a decent service. So that’s what this is all about. It’s getting there. And then the third C, which is capability, being able to [deliver].

“Our customers don’t care about bandwidth. They just care about YouTube working. Our challenge is to make sure that the network we provide works.”

And with Daniel Ballard’s dramatic late-minute playoff semi-final winner taking the Black Cats to a Wembley showdown with Sheffield United, the challenge for VMO2 in Sunderland’s next home game could well be keeping a Premier League quality network experience. Ha’way the Lads.