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.

At about the same time every year, I find myself with too much time on my hands. The Vikings have finished another season without a Lombardi Trophy, the Timberwolves are hardly a basketball team, and the Wild fail to do The State of Hockey hockey proud. What is a Minnesota sports junkie living in Chicago supposed to do?

Thankfully, the start of baseball season is upon us. Teams have reported to Spring Training, and the first game of spring is this Sunday night (February 27). All across the country, sports fans like me live in hostile territory, transplanted from their home market with few options for keeping up with their favorite team.

Fortunately, one option is fantastic in every way.

MLB.TV

MLB.TV allows sports fans to stream any out-of-market game during the regular season over the internet. For an arguably reasonable price of $120, fans of America’s Pastime have the entire season at their fingertips, in their living rooms, at the airport, at work, or anywhere else you can imagine. The package comes with video broadcasts of every out-of-market televised game, as well as the radio broadcasts of every game for the times when watching the game is not an option.

This works quite well using the web-based player on a PC, but it truly dazzles when it comes to my favorite PS3 app (sorry, Netflix). On days where my home internet was running fast, I was able to stream Twins games in 720p. On the other days, the video quality could be degraded gracefully to match connection speed, keeping me from missing any of the action. Since living in Chicago would otherwise limit me to watching the Twins play the White Sox if the Cubs don’t have a game the same day, this subscription is a godsend.

Features

As for the user interface, it’s all fairly standard design. The video player has pause, rewind, slow motion, and fast forward controls, as you would expect. If you have a DVR, this won’t add much to your viewing pleasure. If you’re like me and stuck with obsolete DirecTV equipment, you’ll wonder how you ever watched a sporting event without it.

A couple of the more attractive features include the ability to switch between broadcasts for the current game. If the game is televised in each team’s home market, you can choose which feed to watch on the fly. Also, if watching A-Roid run up the score with his artificially enhanced muscles gets boring, you can easily pick a different game to watch, all without leaving the UI. Overall, it’s much more convenient than the less-developed PC interface.

Drawbacks

MLB.TV is not without its drawbacks, however. For one, the commercial breaks are incredibly boring, even by baseball’s standards. On the PS3 app, you just get a blue screen informing you that your game will resume shortly. On the PC, they play lame commercials later on in the season, and is about as exciting as a game of curling. Occasionally, the game fails to resume streaming after a commercial break, which the only fix is to exit the game screen and re-load it. Nothing horrible, but annoying nonetheless.

With the second season of MLB.TV on the PS3, I’m sure the app will be better than ever. If they can make the commercial breaks less boring and fix the occasional streaming glitch, Major League Baseball just may knock another one out of the park. If you’re a huge baseball fan and you didn’t check it out last year, make sure you don’t miss out on any of the action this year.

The post MLB.TV: It’s That Time of Year Again first appeared on Techerator.

But alas! I am 1 hour into a 3 hour class, and let’s face it – I have no chance of remembering to change my roster when I finish class.  I could jot down a reminder in SimpleNote, or I could pull up Yahoo! Fantasy ’10 for iPhone/iPod Touch (or Android) and swap him for Justin Forsette (he’s about to run all over St. Louis) right on the spot.

As I log in to make the covert roster swap, I see a big red “Roster Alert” button. I’ve never seen one of these before so I push the big red button. Turns out my kickers spot is empty (dropped Garret Heartly) so I make that switch as well.

All of this was very convenient, but this wasn’t why I picked up the app. The main reason I got this app was for live score updates without having to sit in front of a computer all Sunday. I’ve tried to do this on a few separate weekends and so far have had no luck -the app seems to work fine until the games start and then becomes incredibly slow. It has gotten better week by week, and there has been an update since my last attempt so hopefully this gets resolved soon.

This app is fairly simple and useful. Obviously it only does you any good if you have a fantasy football league on Yahoo. It allows you to view all the match-ups going on that week. The app also allows you to read any recent news happening with your players, although it would be nice if you could get alerts for injuries and other news.

If you are in a Yahoo Fantasy League and you have an iOS or Android device, give this a look. It’s good for quick (or last minute) roster changes and can help you keep tabs on how your team is doing on Sundays. If they work out the bugs, that is.

The post Keep Your Roster Up-To-Date with the Yahoo! Fantasy Football App first appeared on Techerator.

The best part about following Olympians on Twitter is that most of them are doing the tweeting personally (unlike so many celebrities that have PR staff posting messages and photos).  Since the Olympians are posting messages from their own phones, you get to see unique shots like this from US Olympic skiier Steven Nyman:

Words of wisdom from US Olympian Apolo Ohno:

And a simple message from US Curler Chris Plys:

A great way to follow the 2010 Vancouver Olympics as well as Olympic athletes is to subscribe to Twitter lists.  Here are a few that I have been following lately that have really added depth and context to the games.

Olympic Twitter Lists

• US Olympians by NPR News – Tweets from US Olympic Athletes. (They have many other Olympic lists, sorted by sport, which you can check out here.)
• Winter Olympics by NY Times – Tweets from Olympic athletes and reporters.
• Winter Olympics Media by NY Times – Tweets from news media and reporters covering the 2010 Winter Olympics.
• Verified Olympians by @verified – Tweets from 2010 Olympians with the added bonus that they are all verified accounts.

There are dozens of other Olympic-related Twitter lists out there, share them with us in the comments if you find any other good ones!

The post Stay Up-To-Date with the Olympics and Olympic Athletes using Twitter first appeared on Techerator.