NEW DELHI: 2024 was the first year where several major European events coincided with a focused buildout of 5G infrastructure from operators in anticipation of soaring mobile traffic demands. These events, including the global sporting event in Paris, European Football Championship, and Taylor Swift's Eras concerts, provided a real-world testing ground for 5G's capabilities in delivering enhanced connectivity experiences in the most challenging traffic environments.

Network performance data from these events show that 5G networks provided a significantly improved user experience compared with 4G at the same locations. Ericsson ConsumerLab polled a sample of consumers representing the 14 million fans who attended these events about their prior expectations and experiences. Two out of three 5G users reported their expectations for connectivity were met or exceeded, with 5G having 20% more satisfied users than 4G at the same venues.

Jasmeet Sethi, Head of ConsumerLab at Ericsson, said: "This study clearly shows that the enhanced experiences 5G provides are driving greater satisfaction. While network speed is important, it's not the most important factor—our findings show that user satisfaction is driven more by the consistency and quality of app performance. As previous ConsumerLab studies have already shown, poor experience can have a lasting impact on customer loyalty, and these results underline that users are willing to pay more for guaranteed service quality. This means that, with 5G standalone, operators have a significant opportunity to meet rising user expectations and capitalize on premium services for consumers seeking assured quality of experience."

The study also found that consumers are willing to pay a premium for guaranteed connectivity and app experience during events. During peak moments of network usage and congestion, users continued to report issues around network dropouts and inconsistent experiences using apps, which the findings show is ten times more impactful on their perception than network speeds. Consumers said they were ready to pay for guaranteed, seamless connectivity to improve their experience during events. 

Given the option to recieve this as part of their event ticket, eventgoers are willing to pay up to 15% more to improve their connectivity and app experience. 5G standalone would allow operators to best meet this requirement, by allowing them to reserve a part of their network to provide assured quality of experience for specific users or apps.

Jenny Lindqvist, Head of Market Area Europe and Latin America, said: "5G is already having a transformative impact on consumers at major events, allowing for more users to live stream or share their experiences. Looking ahead, differentiated connectivity will allow operators to cater for individual user needs and expectations, for instance through guaranteed premium connectivity. This will lead to even higher customer satisfaction and create new revenue opportunities for the operators."

The performance uplift from 5G at these events allowed operators to accommodate a surge in upload traffic driven by real-time live streaming and content sharing. At the Taylor Swift concerts, attendees consumed an average of 5.4 TB of data per night—the equivalent of sharing over 1.7 million images on social media, downloading 94,000 hours of music, or listening to the artist’s entire catalog more than 4,500 times on repeat. 

During the global sporting event in Paris, daily uplink data traffic in central Paris increased by 20%, with uplink traffic also tripling during the opening ceremony. Relying solely on 4G to support this upload traffic would have resulted in overloaded networks and significant connectivity failures.

Tanja Richter, Managing Director Technology & Network Director at Vodafone Germany, said: "Mobile phones are in constant use at concerts, festivals and sporting events. Visitors share their impressions with high-resolution videos, stories and reels on social media to share their experience with friends and the whole world. As this keeps the mobile network really busy, we take such major events into account in our network planning and in many cases activate additional LTE and 5G antennas on site. This ensures that we can process the huge amounts of data simultaneously and reliably, even when thousands of users are on the network at the same time."

Anne Flore Roger, Technical Director, Mobile Network at Orange, said: "Customer experience is at the heart of our strategy. During this year’s global sporting event in Paris, we witnessed unprecedented traffic levels. To accommodate the anticipated 11 million attendees arriving in the city, we deployed numerous temporary mobile sites powered by 5G, which handled 25% of the total traffic—a remarkable figure. Key hot spots were also critical, with just six venues managing 50% of the total load. 
The opening ceremony alone saw traffic surge to three times the volume of a typical busy day, with 5G supporting half of that demand. It's clear that without 5G, we could not have met the connectivity needs of users at this scale."

In addition to the ConsumerLab study, Ericsson conducted a complementary technology paper that delves into the technology enabling the connectivity enhancements seen at these big events. This paper highlights the proactive steps operators took, beginning preparations over a year in advance to handle expected traffic spikes and prevent network interruptions. Capacity expansions focused on 5G, particularly utilizing 5G mid-band TDD spectrum combined with Massive MIMO (multiple-input, multiple-output) technology. This approach proved both cost-effective and efficient, significantly boosting capacity and enhancing experiences for 4G and 5G users alike. 

For example, at the global sporting event in Paris, average throughputs for 5G users were up to six times higher than 4G under regular conditions and four times higher during peak times, while mid-band 5G TDD delivered a 3.5-fold energy efficiency improvement per gigabyte compared to 4G.