Venue Wi-Fi is an Issue, Just Not a 'Big' Issue, Really
By Gary Kim
August 13, 2012
(OLYMPICS TECHNOLOGY)
By all accounts, the London Olympics was able to accommodate bandwidth requirements of attendees at the major sports venues virtually without problems. That might not have been true of the Wi-Fi coverage on the actual volleyball courts, however.
The Olympic network was built to transmit 60 GBps, Cisco (News
- Alert) reported. In fact, Cisco alone set up 30,000 new connections across 94 locations, 2,200 switches, 1,800 wireless access points and 65,000 active network ports and connections. So despite fears of a bandwidth meltdown, nothing of the kind seemed to happen. It seems abundantly clear that new Wi-Fi and other bandwidth strategies are required to support the new amount of demand for in-stadium bandwidth supporting tablets and smart phones.
The good news is that it appears bandwidth planners are capable of doing their jobs, adding more capacity and anticipating venue bandwidth demand.
At the most recent Super Bowl, its customers sent and received about 215 GBytes worth of data while the New York Giants were playing the New England Patriots.
The 2011 Super Bowl saw AT&T (News
- Alert) traffic of about 175 Gbytes, according to Mobile Sports Report.During the first seven days of the 2012 London Olympics, U.S. bandwidth used for Netflix declined 25 percent, while bandwidth used to watch NBC's Olympic “TV Everywhere” coverage represented 34 percent of total bandwidth across major U.S. networks nationwide.
It’s more than clear that video is a new factor inside major sports venues, but as the latest Super Bowls and the London Olympics have demonstrated, network planners can anticipate and accommodate those demands. held in Indianapolis in early 2012, AT&T (News
- Alert) customers set new records for data traffic being sent from a sports site, according to AT&T, which says
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Edited by Allison Boccamazzo
