BT on its marks for 2012 Olympics

BT director for service delivery Stuart Hill explains how BT will be gearing up to deliver a glitch-free 2012 London Olympics - including security guards for every router

BT is preparing for 2012

Imagine it's the 100 metres final at the 2012 London Olympics – the starter pistol goes off and a massive network failure occurs at the Olympic Park site. Billions of people watching worldwide point an accusing finger at the Games' communications provider, BT.

It’s a hypothetical situation nobody wants to see, especially the man shouldering responsibility for avoiding such nightmare scenarios, BT vice president and director for the London 2012 communications delivery programme Stuart Hill. He has the unenviable task of delivering the whole communications framework and back-office connectivity for the London Games.

Speaking at the Communications Management Association (CMA) conference in London this week, Hill showed a video of Usain Bolt's extraordinary 100 metre-winning performance in Beijing last year.

"Think of how you'd feel if the network manager came up to you afterwards and had to explain why the network had gone down during those 10 seconds," he said.

As an example of the challenge facing BT, Hill said the network infrastructure being put in by BT would have to support a “unique” data rate out of the main arena of 48Mbit/s. To handle this traffic volume, Hill said BT will be using only tried and tested technology, but will have duplicate local area networks (LANs) and routing infrastructure in an effort to cope with any outages.

Hill said he is having to “re-engineer” some of BT's own processes to be able to deliver the Olympics' service specifications and product portfolios before June this year. As an example of the challenges that are forcing BT to improvise, Hill said that for some events BT will not be able to physically get into the venues early.

"The Wimbledon tennis championships finish a month before the Games begin, so we can’t build before then," he said.

BT and its partners "would need such agility to commission and provide services with very short lead times," he added.

Between 800 and 900 people on the main site and around other venues hosting Olympic events will be available to Hill for the two weeks of 27 July to 12 August 2012 to make sure the communications infrastructure holds up.

"We will be putting reliability ahead of heroics, and we'll freeze the technology to be used two years before the games start. Remember at the Atlanta Games, it eventually had to deploy a fair-sized team of runners delivering media files and event results to journalists – we're not aiming to emulate that," he said.

The calibre of the people required to troubleshoot the network and deal with other communications-related problems is an issue for Hill, and he will be sending a team to monitor the Vancouver Winter Olympics in 2010 and to see what experience he can bring into his set-up.

"I'll be poaching people from Vancouver - of course I will - I reckon 70 per cent of the knowledge acquired by their team will be transferable to the challenges we'll have in London," he said.

Network management and monitoring to produce detailed information during the two weeks of the 2012 Games is a key objective.

“If a butterfly flaps its wings in Weymouth [home to the Olympic sailing competitions], I want to know about it," he said.

"When I recently went round the 550-acre Olympic Park with [BT chairman] Sir Michael Rake and [London organising committee chairman] Seb Coe, I thought - we're building a train set the like of which we've never seen before."

BT 2012 factsheet

BT has laid 4,500km of optical fibre internally at the Olympic Park – equivalent to a distance stretching halfway to Beijing.
A service level agreement (SLA) of “five-nines” - 99.999 per cent - availability over a year gives an acceptable system downtime of 5.5 minutes. For the duration of the 2012 Olympics, a five-nines SLA equates to just 12 seconds of downtime – or the approximate duration of the blue ribbon men's 100 metres sprint.
All manhole covers between the Olympic Park and serving exchanges will be taped and sealed throughout the Olympic and Paralympic Games.
BT will have rigorously accredited on-site support staff standing next to all switches and routers.
BT has instituted a one-to-one spares strategy, where for each type of equipment supplied to a venue at least one spare will be provided.
There will be more than 12,000 athletes from 200 countries in nearly 400 events at the Games – and 25,000 people from the media.