All-IP World Cup possible

Johannesburg, 24 Nov 2006

The World Cup is an opportunity for SA to rebuild and reinvent networks, and leave a legacy.

This is according to Norm Silins, GM of Olympic Services at Bell Canada, keynote speaker at the Connect IT: Joburg 2010 conference, in Sandton this week, organised by the City of Johannesburg and ITWeb.

Bell Canada is the telecommunications provider for the Vancouver Winter Olympics in February 2010.

Bell is preparing for "the first all-IP games". All the finished services will be delivered over an IP network, said Silins.

"The World Cup is a unique opportunity to rebuild networks, reinvent traditional networks and leave a legacy for the host city and the country."

He believes "good games is good TV".

"The world will judge you by what they see on the box, by what the broadcasters experience. And can tell the world that you are leaders in this area. The press and the broadcasters will determine by what they show on the box how we are assessed as a network, as an organising committee, as a country."

One needs to prepare for a "flawless execution", stressed Silins. It is critical to understand the requirements of the customer-base - the press, athletes, organisers and spectators. He said Bell had defined 19 different "finished customer-based services in agonising detail".

This included doing the legwork upfront, detailing the requirements to ensure good design and development, and outstanding delivery.

Silins's advice to Telkom, which will deploy a similar solution for the 2010 World Cup:

* Know the user requirements (media, athletes and officials particularly) and define them "in agonising detail".
* Keep in mind the legacy opportunities for the overlay - can the equipment be reused at the venues? Can the equipment be reused in the network and affect a modernisation opportunity?
* Design early and iterate often.
* Contain the scope of work to deliver flawless telecom services.
* Create a dedicated team to manage and deliver the World Cup services.
* Reliability, security and redundancy are the key design criteria.

"Our forecast is that everybody's going to have a video phone, everybody's going to be recording. Bell is expanding the cellular network coverage and capacity to prepare for increased usage."

Bell is also preparing for 100% high-definition (HD) broadcasting. "In Athens, 10% of broadcasting was HD. In Torino 50% was HD; we expect Beijing to be 100% HD, and our design for supporting the broadcasters during Vancouver Olympics is a complete HD design.

"The requirements for that, when you build it into your network to support the event, are to be able to provision 26MB per broadcast signal - that's one camera - and I imagine you'll have at least 50 cameras per stadium."

SA must prepare to support this massive requirement for bandwidth, he noted. "I would start to plough in a lot of fibre now. The broadcasters will do it all on fibre. The cameras terminate directly on fibre."

Two legacies

The cost

Bell's commitment to Vancouver 2010 is $200 million. This sum includes $90 million in cash, $25 million in marketing programmes to support Vancouver 2010, $15 million in athlete programmes, $10 million for community programmes that leave a legacy in the community, and $60 million in value in kind to supply the telecommunications requirements to support the flawless delivery of the games.
The $60 million value in kind includes the supply of all the telecommunication requirements for Vancouver 2010, including voice, data, Internet, PCS, radio, WiFi, broadcast services (audio/video), and the hosting and content management of the Vancouver2010.com Web site.
It also includes all the provisioning, activation, operations support and project management required to support these finished services. The design of the Olympic telecom network for 2010 is a completely dedicated overlay network with no intermingling of network traffic.

A legacy is created because of the infrastructure left behind at the venues, providing the latest in electronics and bandwidth, Silins explained.

"The other thing is the legacy in capability; the opportunity to upgrade the capability of your labour force - because you have an event to train for that requires a spike in capabilities, in the number of people skilled and in the ability for tertiary education institutions to train for them."

This physical and intellectual legacy can move the country and the IT community forward, and create a competitive environment, he said.

"Vancouver has a requirement for 500 trained technicians at the games time, and we only have 60 in that area. We are taking the best technicians across Canada to work there for six weeks and bring the experience back to their community.

"We are doing specific three- and four-year programmes, with technical colleges and post-secondary education institutions to train engineers to operate some of the technology and work hands-on at the games. A unique opportunity to make people passionately patriotic about this country and ensure they won't leave. It's a seminal moment; it's a unique opportunity," stressed Silins.

Redundancy

Silins said there will be 21 major venues, which have redundant fibre optic connection and all the electronics are set by dual-pass fibre. The infrastructure will also include battery backups and data centres.

"On our fibre optic sonic network, we have a 50-millisecond fail over - in a blink of an eye, if one fibre is cut, it automatically switches over to the other one so you won't even see a flash on the screen.

"It's way more than five-nines reliability. My goal is that those 500 technicians are completely idle - because if they are working, there's something wrong."