UPDATED 11:40 EST / FEBRUARY 08 2012

Traveling Super Bowl Fans Inflated Indy’s WiFi Nearly 20%

Ever wondered where those fans during Super Bowl come from? Indianapolis can’t possibly have that many people taking a day just to watch the event. Here’s a data from JiWire showing the top 20 places where the fans traveled from.

“It’s no doubt that each year the Super Bowl attracts an abundance of fans from all over the country. JiWire looked across its entire network of the on-the-go audience connecting to cafes, hotels and airports, to determine the top 20 places that fans traveled from to attend Super Bowl XLVI and watch the New York Giants play the New England Patriots live.”

The tops 5 cities were Chicago, Boston, Detroit, Dallas, and Philadelphia. Among the devices that were used by the on-the-go audience, smartphones top the chart with 47 percent market share, followed by laptops and tablets at 29 percent and 24 percent respectively. Overall, connectivity in Indianapolis alone increased by 18 percent during the event.

While fans travel across America just to catch the game, brands and advertisers are all about marketing and leveraging the world of social-mobile-local. Instead of paying large sums of money for a 30-second cable ad slot, they might as well take advantage of fans’ heavy mobile usage. Mobile marketing company Velti says users connect beyond their in-person friends and are likely to check their phones 10 times more during the game.

Even popular quarterbacks Eli Manning and Tom Brady didn’t escape analytics, as Twitter sentiment compared their positive impressions, putting Manning ahead with 65 percent over Brady’s 62 percent. Here’s also a thought-provoking article from Sandvine about the plunge of internet traffic and Netflix’s viewership during the event. For more on social-mobile, check out this roundup.

image credit: nj.com

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