London Olympics 2012 and Technology

My barber and I enjoyed watching the recently held London Olympics 2012. When he asked me why I was able to watch so many of the sports events LIVE even when they were being shown at the same time. I said, “It’s all about TECHNOLOGY.”

Watching on regular TV and through my MacBook, IPAD, IPHONE and IPOD using the APPs Live Extra and NBCOLYMPICS, I could access as many shows that NBC and all its affiliates offered even simultaneously.

The success of the London Olympics 2012 was indeed evident because of the shows that the world saw – the grandiose Opening Ceremony, the exciting events as athletes from different nations compete fiercely, fairly and in a friendly and fun way, and the captivating, colorful and classic Closing Ceremony.

We all know about the security precautions that were made to prevent terrorist attacks. From the beginning to the end, all participants went about doing their business successfully without any hitches.

Unnoticed and perhaps, even underappreciated, is the technology that enabled all of us to enjoy London Olympics 2012. As Gerry Pennell, CIO for LOCOG said, “Delivering the technology for the Games requires the organizing committee and all of our partners to work together as one team to deliver an incredibly complex technology solution.”

Let us look at the following statistics as reported by Mr. Pennell:

1. London2012.com became the most popular sports website in the world. It had 38.3 billion page views, peaking at 96,871 page views per second.
2. About 1.2 Petabytes of data were transferred over the website, with a peak rate of 22.8 Gigabits/second. On the busiest day there were 13.1 million unique visitors.
3. The Olympic network, which connected 94 locations (including 34 competition venues), carried 961 Terabytes of information during the games.
4. On the busiest day, the BBC delivered 2.8ptbs.
5. The BBC saw 12 million requests for video on mobile across the whole of the Games.
6. During the Games, daily video traffic over BT’s retail broadband network increased on average by 19%.
7. Atos transmitted the results to the world’s commentators in 0.3 seconds.  
8. Around 13.2 million minutes (or 220,000 hours) of BT WiFi were used across the Olympic Park venues.
9. Acer provided 13,500 desktops; 2,900 notebooks; 950 servers and storage systems and a number of tablet PCs.

Atos Business Technologies is the brains behind the IT operations for the Olympic Games. It was responsible for managing efficiently and effectively 3,500 technology specialists.

There were 220,000 hours of robust testing to deliver the IT; and 1 million man-hours spent to deliver the communications infrastructure.

BT (British Telecom) had 500,000 WiFi hot spots across London including the UK’s largest installation in the Olympic Park; and 5,500 km of cable were installed to support digital communications across 94 locations for London 2012, equivalent distance from New York to London.

With the amazing IT infrastructure and management, it handled and experienced the social excitement during the men’s 100m final noticing 2360 tweets per second. Noted by BT were also the following: 6gb per second data across the BT network, which is equivalent to 3000 photos; and 55,000 views per second on the London 2012 website at its peek – in total there were 430 million visits.

Indeed, we are amazed at the current state of technology, which was used to assist a very successful event such as the London Olympics.

At the current rate of technological advancement, we would definitely see a more exciting Rio de Janeiro 2016!

CAN’T WAIT!!!