Lucas Oil Stadium, home of Super Bowl XLVI, will house around 85,000 spectators during the big game. There will be even more people in the surrounding area. To handle the inevitable high demand of cellular data traffic, Verizon will be setting up three cell-on-wheels (COWs), as they’re called, in extremely high-demand areas around the stadium. There will also be 400 3G and 4G LTE antennas spread out throughout the inside of the stadium, as well as 600 free WiFi hotspots that can handle 28,000 simultaneous connections. All of this is expected to handle 2.5 times the traffic of a normal NFL game.

This is the first Super Bowl that will have 4G LTE connectivity in the area, so Lucas Oil Stadium, as well as 30 other downtown venues will be packing the latest 4G LTE antennas and technology.

The cost of all this? A cool $69 million.

The best part is, all of the upgrades made to the stadium and downtown will be left in place (except the COWs). So, the next time you’re in Indy, expect to get crazy fast speeds.

There’s no estimate as to exactly how fast the 4G LTE will be for spectators during the Super Bowl, but GottaBeMobile.com was able to sneak inside the stadium before gameday and run a few speed tests. They ended up hitting 46 Mb/s download speeds. Not too shabby, but they were one of the only ones using it at the time, so don’t expect to get that kind of speed come Super Bowl Sunday.

Super Bowl XLVI will include the first ever social media command center used at a Super Bowl. A team of reps will be on hand to help you out via social media if you need it. They’ll be constantly looking for certain words or phrases that pertain to the Super Bowl. For example, if you tweet that the parking garage by the stadium is full, they’ll tweet back to you saying where more parking can be found based on other tweets. The social media command center will also be used to send out alerts if there would be any kind of emergency.

Lucas Oil Stadium image credit: Shawna Pierson

The post Super Bowl XLVI: The Year of Connectivity first appeared on Techerator.

Why use ShareTool?

Let’s say you have a Mac at home and a Mac at work, or maybe you travel a lot and can’t take all your files (like your music) with you. ShareTool provides the perfect solution for these problems: it allows a person to access his/her home computer from any place with an internet connection.

For example, I keep my relatively large music library on a Mac Mini at home. I work on an iMac at work. I can’t transfer all my music to my work computer and then worry about it being synced, kept up-to-date, etc. – so I turn on ShareTool at home, turn on ShareTool at work, and my iTunes library pops up under ‘Shared’.

The real beauty of ShareTool is how invisible it is. Once you’re connected, everything shows up on your Mac exactly like you are connected directly to that remote network.

Not just music

While ShareTool is great for iTunes sharing, that’s not the only thing it’s good at. Any Bonjour services that are enabled on your home computer are accessible to ShareTool (via System Preferences>Sharing).

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve needed a file on my home computer while I’m at work or away on vacation. ShareTool makes file sharing as simple as mounting an external drive since it adds the home computer right into the sidebar of Finder.

Screen sharing is also available through ShareTool and it’s a joy to use. One click and you’re controlling your home computer. This feature is also very useful for a quick preview of larger files.

While ShareTool may not transfer files as intelligently as software like Dropbox, it’s great to be able to browse my entire desktop at any time.

Negatives

While I don’t have much to complain about with ShareTool, there are a few downsides. My biggest gripe is that the host computer needs to remain on for it to be useful. This is a rather obvious point but it does mean more electricity usage. There are some options for remote waking of computers, but I haven’t had a chance to fool around with those.  Luckily for me the Mac Mini is so power efficient I haven’t noticed an increase in my electric bill.

The only other thing I have a slight issue with is the need for ShareTool to be installed on each computer that’s being used. It’s not just a process that runs on the home computer; a ShareTool license must be purchased for each unique Mac. For their part, Yazsoft does a pretty good job of offering bundles for ShareTool and their other Mac apps (SpeedDownload for faster downloads, and Playback to enable media sharing with PS3, Xbox 360, or other UPnP devices).

Conclusion

If easy sharing between Macs is what you need, ShareTool is the way to go. It’s cheap, easy, and works really well. At $20 for one license or $30 for a bundle of 2, this program is a bargain.

What other Mac apps do you use for screen sharing? Let us know in the comments.

The post ShareTool Offers Super Easy File Sharing on a Mac first appeared on Techerator.