History was made – and shared – during Super Bowl 50

It wasn’t just Peyton Manning and the Denver Broncos’ defense that made history. Super Bowl 50 now holds the unofficial record as the most connected and shared championship game in history.

Throughout the week and on game day, Verizon customers used 68.8 terabytes (TB) or 68,800 gigabytes (GB) of wireless data in the Bay Area on videos, web searches, social media updates and more. That’s the equivalent of 45 million social media posts!

This was possible thanks to a $70 million long-term investment by Verizon to more than triple its 4G LTE wireless data network capacity in the Bay Area for Super Bowl week.

Super Bowl Sunday shatters record.

On game day, fans at Levi’s Stadium racked up more than 7 terabytes of data on the Verizon network alone. In comparison, at the 2015 Super Bowl, Verizon customers in Phoenix used 4.1 terabytes of data and in 2014 fans in New Jersey used 1.9 terabytes. That marks a 268 percent or nearly three-fold increase in usage in just two years.

The biggest spikes in network activity happened when Denver recovered the fumble and scored in the first quarter, with a 15 percent data surge. Data usage hit a game-day high with a 24 percent increase during the big halftime show.

Video was the MVP with nearly 20 percent of usage on game day. Other fan faves were web searches and social media sharing that accounted for 19.62 percent and 17.67 percent of the total wireless data traffic on the Verizon network, respectively.

The special team of network testers who were monitoring and managing the network in real-time in Santa Clara on Game Day logged more 130 miles on their FitBits connected to the Verizon network.

I used my data in San Francisco.

For the days leading up to the big game, Verizon customers Tweeted, emailed, Facebooked, Googled, Snapchatted, navigated and more to the tune of 30 terabytes of data. From Super Bowl City presented by Verizon to the 50th Mile to the NFL Experience driven by Hyundai, fans with Verizon service were covered thanks to the added 4G LTE capacity through a network of small cells, macro cell sites and mobile cell sites. That’s an investment that will benefit customers living in and traveling to northern California well into the future, too.

There’s always next year.

The football season may be over, but preparations have been underway for more than a year for Super Bowl LI in Houston, and after that in Minneapolis, to ensure the championship network experience continues.