London Olympic Games online live pressure

According to foreign media reports, the 2012 London Summer Olympic Games will become the most networked in the history of the Olympic Games. As athletes compete for gold in the arena, hundreds of millions of sports fans around the world will also test London's telecoms and data center infrastructure. Can London's broadband, internet and wireless networks meet demand? Here are some key systems and their preparations for the games.

Internet

BT and Cisco are working together to create a network for the London Olympics, from internet access to it technology to the Olympic Area Network, which provides information on television commentators and screen images. BT has also installed optical networks for 2,818 rooms in the Olympic Village, making it the first beneficiaries of broadband adjustment for athletes and coaches who live there. British telecoms engineers have laid out 5500 of kilometres of optical cables, the equivalent of a distance from London to New York to support the network, which transmits 60GB of data per second, equivalent to a Wikipedia every 0.5 seconds.

The Olympic network will provide 30,000 connections in 94 different locations, and Cisco provides infrastructure including 2,200 converters, 1800 wireless access points, 7,000 cable TV access points, 16,500 telephones, and 65,000 active network ports.

The Olympic communications network will be managed by the London 2012 Technology Operations Center in Canary Wharf, the hub of London's large database. More than 90 BT employees will be working every 12 hours to avoid internet congestion after the games start.

Site

Is the Olympic website london2012.com ready for huge traffic? Wired Enterprise reported that the organisers of the London Olympic Games had hired a professional website test service Soasta to test the Olympic website's strength. Soasta Engineers spent 6 months working with the Austrian team, not only simulating the huge flow of Olympic websites, but also adding a lot of mobile apps. Tom Lounibos, chief executive of Soasta, said the test results showed that the London Olympic website Tom Launibos better than any other Olympic site, and Soasta ensured that the site was able to cope with 1 billion of visitors during the games.

But others are not so sure. Compuware, another website testing service, found that London2012.com's performance in multiple indicators was unsatisfactory. Michael Allen, head of IT service management at Compuware, said the London Olympic website would require more than 260 server requests to load some pages. "We expect that some of the structural problems we find will expand into performance problems as traffic increases," says Allen. For example, if only thousands of people visited the site at the same time, the number of requests would be acceptable, but if there were tens of thousands of people, a large number of requests would cause the server to be too stressed. ”

Webcast

The London Olympics will be an unprecedented webcast. Nearly 20% of Britons say they will watch the Games ' live webcast via PCs, laptops or tablets. The BBC predicts that a live webcast of the Olympic Games in the UK will generate 1 trillion bytes of traffic per second, equivalent to 1500 people downloading a DVD-format movie every minute.

"It is clear that more sports content will be consumed over the internet this summer and that the Internet is becoming a real replacement for television," said Greg McCulloch, executive director of the Interxion, the database service provider, Gregg Macarochi. The key to providing these users with an excellent sports program viewing experience is the real-time content of the low buffer time. ”

London's data centre will play a key role. As London's traffic will be tested by a large number of tourists, the Interxion database team has arranged "sleeping pods" in its London database Park to allow its staff to rest in the park to ensure that the number of employees remains adequate throughout the games. Because of this time, the road traffic and subway in London certainly cannot guarantee staff to travel to and from the park in time.

Wireless network

With 1 million people expected to travel to London during the Olympics, wireless networks will be under great pressure, a test of the quality of data services. Mobile operators have invested in building new base stations and expanding their network capacity to address the additional burden of Olympic venues, such as BT's Wi-Fi network at the core of the Olympic Park to support 100,000 of thousands of users. But outside the Olympic venues, the existing network infrastructure resources will be too fragmented, leading to popular tourist attractions and transport hubs can not meet the needs of more users.

"Voice services can cope, but for many users, the quality of 3G data services may be unacceptable," said Richard Kateley, chief technology officer at Actix, a mobile network watchdog and optimization service provider. "Actix said that the current network in central London is close to saturation, usually a square kilometer area can support approximately 50,000 independent users per day, 800,000 3G data connections, 15,000 3G voice calls, and 30,000 2G voice calls.

Bill McHale, chief executive of Actix, said: "The projected level of traffic in the London Olympic Park indicates the scale of investment that operators need to meet a site's network needs." Unfortunately, operators are unable to make such investments in every location to boost network capacity. ”