If you’re able to easily access your network in a crowd of thousands, there might be a DAS at work. AT&T, partnering with the stadium's management company SMG, outfitted the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans with one—a network of 1,000 antenna nodes that that split a signal among several smaller antennas. This neutral host DAS could be accessed by any phone company. The technology provides the same coverage and reliability over an area that a single cell tower might cover. A DAS can be used instead of the antenna arrays you see on towers or on top of buildings with a smaller footprint. They are useful for regions with difficult landscapes (like Palo Alto’s hills and trees) or even large venues like the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans. Spots like those were among the 200 distributed antenna systems AT&T installed in 2011 as part of more than 150,000 network improvements it made that year.