NetHosted Blog

With the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic games just around the corner, final preparations are being done to ensure that the event runs as smoothly as possible (this is England after all!) One of the big talking points at this stage, is whether the UK mobile networks will be able to keep up with the demand of hundreds of thousands of people in the capital trying to stream video, update their social media pages and text/call their friends and family, all in one relatively small area. Spectators at the Beijing 2008 Olympics had similar concerns which came into fruition when many people complained of slow network speeds when trying to upload pictures and video of the opening / closing ceremonies. The Olympic Committee here have attempted to combat this issue by teaming up with a venture called the Join Operators Olympic Group (JOOG) which is made up of various UK network operators such as O2, Everything Everywhere, 3, Vodafone and BT. Together, they plan on making networks more available for not only the tourists and visitors to the games, but also for the residents and businesses of the area that will otherwise be affected by the major increase in network activity over the few weeks of the olympics.

British Telecom (BT) have added to this by bringing in roughly 500,000 Wi-Fi hotspots that will be stationed around the centre of London, providing fast and reliable internet access to anyone with Wi-Fi enabled devices that wishes to get online during the games. With BT’s track record of providing Wi-Fi hotspots throughout the country, they’ll be hoping that there are no issues, but they won’t be praying as much as the O2 bosses, who only yesterday had a major headache as their network went into disarray across the country. Both 2G and 3G networks experienced issues, meaning customers were left for most of the day without service, disrupting day-to-day lives and businesses too. Being one of the main members of the aforementioned JOOG group, they’ll want to make sure everything is in order as this is most definitely a huge embarrassment for the company less than 2 weeks before the Olympic games are due to start.

A new take on wireless network access in stadiums has been deployed for these games, where over 50 antennae have been placed around the stadium for a seamless internet connection. Previous events have simply had the venue split into 4 sections and 4 antennae, so engineers are confident that this is going to be one of the best connected Olympics to date.

It’s going to undoubtedly be one of the largest sporting events that the UK has ever seen and in this tech-savvy day and age, having access to the internet and mobile networks throughout the event will be key to the world seeing what we, as the United Kingdom, have to offer the rest of the world.