Acrisure Stadium, the home of the NFL’s Pittsburgh Steelers and the University of Pittsburgh’s football team, has installed 60 of MatSing’s Lens Antennas to improve cellular coverage across the stadium’s upper seating bowl.
Deployed by Verizon Wireless with integrator Beam Wireless, the MatSing installation supports all cellular bands and frequencies, including C-Band for 5G connectivity, according to a press release from the companies. The Acrisure Stadium deal adds to MatSing’s growing number of NFL stadium clients, a list that now includes major deployments at AT&T Stadium, SoFi Stadium, and Allegiant Stadium, as well as smaller installations at other venues, including U.S. Bank Stadium, Mercedes-Benz Stadium and others. MatSing antennas can also be found in a number of other professional sports venues, including Amalie Arena in Tampa, Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee and at UBS Arena in New York.
According to MatSing CEO Bo Larsson, the deployment in Acrisure Stadium is a bit different than others since it only covers the upper seating bowl, an area that had historically been hard to cover with previous wireless gear. Instead of the larger ball-shaped antennas MatSing uses in other arenas, which offer greater distance support, in Pittsburgh the company used a mix of 20 multi-beam antennas (which hide smaller ball devices inside a rectangular-looking enclosure) as well as 40 single-band ball antennas. In a phone interview with Larsson he said the smaller ball antennas are used to support lower-band frequencies, while the multi-beam antennas support higher bands, including C-band frequencies, which are being used for 5G services.
The MatSing antennas have been in place since the start of the season, and Larsson said the early reports from the stadium tech crews was that coverage was excellent at some early-season sellouts, including the Steelers’ last home game and the Sept. 1 rivalry tilt between Pitt and West Virginia.
“We’re very pleased to hear the results [of the new coverage] are good,” Larsson said. “It’s another proof point that MatSing devices work very well at all sizes of venues.”
