VANCOUVER – It’s not just the athletes that are gearing up for Friday’s start of the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.
Bell is running its own final checks across its Bell Olympic Network as it prepares to deliver the first all-IP Games in history.
“Typically technology is a silent partner of the Games – what we do is usually not known”, said Justin Webb, Bell’s VP of Olympic Services and Operations, during a technical briefing for media earlier this week. “Our collective mandate for 2010, and Bell’s mandate in particular… is what we call ‘flawless Games’. To be perfect.”
No mean feat when you’re responsible for a dedicated fibre network stretching 5000 km, all wireless voice and data services, broadcast support, Internet portal services, plus the myriad of other communications services required to stage an event of the magnitude of the Olympics.
Every image seen on TV, every news story filed to the world, and every real-time score transmitted will traverse the Bell Olympic Network, which Bell designed and built from scratch in partnership with Avaya, Samsung and the Games’ organizing committee VANOC. Bell said that it had 450 technicians dedicated to the project.
“We’re the first in Olympic history to build a dedicated infrastructure purpose-built to support the Games, and we’re the first to deliver greater than 20GB of bandwidth to connect the Games to the world,” Webb continued. “We’re delivering more capacity to connect the rights-holding broadcasters here in Vancouver to the world than in any other Olympic Games.”
Webb said that by having more services (phone, Internet and TV) per cable in an IP pipe resulted in a significant reduction in cabling. This, in turn, allowed for a more efficient deployment of nodes which translates in to less power consumption and a reduction of the Games’ carbon footprint.
But they’re ready.
“Our Olympic moment starts when the lights go up in the Opening Ceremony and ends when they go down after the Closing is complete”, Webb added. “And that’s when we’ll really be judged on our ‘flawless games’ delivery, and when we will wear the gold medal around our neck for our performance.”
