Though the crowd at Donald Trump’s Friday inauguration ceremony appeared to be smaller than in years past, that didn’t stop the cheering throng from burning through a massive amount of data.
According to an AT&T spokesman, the carrier’s customers on the National Mall used a stunning 4.5 TB of data, or the equivalent of 11 million selfies. The spokesman said that usage was measured across the seven Super COWs AT&T placed along the Mall, as well as macro cell sites and Distributed Antenna Systems serving the National Mall area from midnight to 12:30 p.m. on Friday.
For comparison, the spokesman said onlookers used just 527 GB of data during the 2013 inauguration over the course of the entire day. And at Super Bowl 50 last year, AT&T customers sucked up 5.2 TB of data.
Verizon users were even more avid consumers of data during the inauguration.
According to the spokesman, Verizon customers used double the data compared to an average Friday – or about 7 TB. Approximately 67 percent of that data was used for web browsing and social media, with Facebook and Snapchat topping the list of most used apps.
A Sprint spokeswoman said Sprint’s network also carried a heavy data tonnage load during the event. From midnight to 6 p.m. the day of the inauguration, the spokeswoman said total data usage on Sprint’s network in the National Mall area was 6.2 TB.
T-Mobile did not immediately respond to a request for statistics, but this article will be updated if their numbers come in.
Even without the Un-carrier’s usage figures, though, it seems total data usage during the inauguration amounted to 18.4 TB, easily surpassing the more than 15 TB of data used by football fans at the 2016 Super Bowl.
You can find out more on how the carriers went about preparing for the inauguration data surge in DC via the link.
Those not on site at the National Mall also gobbled up the pomp and circumstance via live streaming of the inauguration, with Akamai Technologies reporting a peak of 8.7 Tbps just after noon at the start of the president’s speech. More live streaming stats from Akamai can be found over on our wireline sister site, CED, here.
