AT&T juicing up service in Austin, TX for SXSW

AT&T is throwing a ton of cash and bringing in an equal amount of
equipment for the SXSW conference including:

* Installing a Distributed Antenna System (DAS) at the Austin
Convention Center. The DAS is comprised of 50 antenna nodes that
provide the equivalent coverage of eight cell sites.
* Improving the cell sites in the surrounding area by utilizing
30MHz of spectrum for 3G instead of the standard 10MHz and upgrading
the system to include the 850MHz band and HSPA.
* Bringing in three temporary cell sites that are positioned in
areas expected to see high traffic.
* Improving the backhaul by beefing up the fiber optic connections
that serve the eight cell sites of the DAS and the three temporary
sites. According to sources within AT&T, the backhaul capacity has
seen a fourfold increase.

The stakes are high for AT&T as a network failure could wipe away any
gains in consumer confidence AT&T saw following its favorable review
from PC World last week.

By by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Mar 1st 2010 at 8:00PM
http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/01/atand...for-sxsw-2010/

<quote>
A key... "reason AT&T is pushing to get ready for SXSW is that the
convention has become sort of an unofficial testing ground for the
next big social apps. A few years ago, Twitter made its first big push
around SXSW, and last year, Foursquare was the app to use (which has
since spawned a brand new genre of app, the "check-in" network).

So what's going to be the app pushing data through the AT&T network
this year?

The buzz so far is around Twitter's coming ad platform, though it's
hard to think that an ad platform could be a killer app. My money's on
some sort of location-based social game -- while Foursquare has gaming
elements, I think an app like MyTown could take the concept even
farther, and we still haven't really seen an actual GPS-based RPG or
MMO break out. Even those of us who aren't at SXSW this year will be
paying attention to what people are doing on their iPhones there,
because odds are good that the app that clicks with attendees there
will be what we're all playing with in a few months."

http://www.tuaw.com/2010/03/01/atand...for-sxsw-2010/