If you're attending the NFL Draft 2023 next week, you'll have to deal with huge crowds, expensive parking, and overpriced food. But as long as you are a Verizon customer with a 5G smartphone, there is a consolation prize.

Prior to this year's NFL Draft, Verizon set up temporary support at an outdoor venue in Kansas City, Missouri, expected to draw more than 300,000 fans to the largest stage in the event's history. In addition to recent network upgrades that brought 5G ultra-wideband to a large portion of the market, Verizon deployed multiple cell sites throughout the region where the draft will take place for three days beginning this Thursday (April 27).

As a unit, these sites take the form of a matting ball that looks like two inflatable balloons perched on a scissor lift. The ball, which also serves as a billboard for Verizon, is equipped with antennas for 5G and 4G LTE. Placing the matting ball in a crowd-pleasing, unobstructed location will allow customers to enjoy reliable cellular service despite the extraordinary bandwidth stresses.

Whether it is a large sporting event or a music festival, cellular Internet speeds suffer when stretched between the burgeoning number of smartphones. Permanent matballs are set up at venues that regularly draw crowds, but Verizon's portable units present a solution for one-off events like the NFL Draft.

And it's not just for fans. They are especially essential for emergency response in areas hit by hurricanes, tornadoes, and other unexpected disasters, but they are also safeguards for planned public safety activities.

I tested 5G speeds on an iPhone 14 Pro Max standing under one of the matting mats at the NFL draft site. Download speeds reached 3,949 Mbps (about 3.95 Gbps) and upload speeds reached 153 Mbps.

These speeds are outstanding, if not the best I have ever tested. Between the new 5G ultra-wideband infrastructure and the temporary matting unit, Verizon has put me in the perfect position to download movies, live stream to social media, and enjoy cloud gaming on my 5G smartphone.

That said, the test area was mostly empty; on NFL Draft day, hundreds of thousands of football fans will be sharing antennas. Most of those people won't be stressing over the Internet capabilities of their 5G phones - after all, one of the most anticipated sporting events of the year is happening right before their eyes - but should still have no trouble connecting.

So whether it's calling a rideshare, searching for a place in Kansas City with great barbecue, watching a highlight reel of draft picks on YouTube, or showing your friends the festivities on FaceTime, Verizon ensured that customers participating in the draft would not have to think twice about the quality of their cell phone connections.