Winter Olympics 2006 Turin Italy – technology wibro/wimax
The 2006 Winter Olympics are coming up. This time around, the olympics are being held in Turin, Italy. The official site can be found here. I can’t say that I’ve been a huge fan of the Olympics, but there are things that interest me. First is the security environment. Obviously the Olympics is a high-profile event and unfortunately has been the target of trouble before. I can’t help but have a concern (and prayer) that the security will be clamped down in such a way that all the events go off smoothly and that sport is the main story for their run. Of course, the next thing on my mind is the technology aspect…. from this announcement
Just from a spectators standpoint, the technology that goes into designing everything for the most aerodynamic result is very interesting, but the behind the scenes stuff is also interesting. One such behind the scenes tech item is the trial of wibro/wimax at the games….
Telecom Italia has signed a deal with South Korea’s Samsung Electronics to run trials of new Wireless Broadband (WiBro) mobile technology at the Winter Olympics in Turin. The Turin Olympics will run from February 10 to February 26, 2006.
The announcement follows the world’s first trial of the WiBro service as a part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum that took place last month in Pusan, South Korea.
Telecom Italia chief executive Riccardo Ruggiero said in an interview to daily La Repubblica: “I expect that in 2007 we could start selling these services”
Samsung’s WiBro system employs Runcom’s Tornado RNE201 SoC, the world’s first ASIC implementation of the 802.16e standard.
Also, Lenovo is a company that obtained IBM’s pc division, they’re the official computing-equipment provider for the games. They also are behind the “commentator information system” which is a browser based program that allows commentators to use lenovo kiosks to retrieve information on the results of events. Lenovo is also running 7 internet lounges for athletes, journalists and trainers and coaches…
In fact, what I find interesting is they did testing to simulate the three busiest days of the Olympics… they tested, among other things, scenarios for hardware failures and security breaches as well…. For reliability they’ve got redundant network connections to their data center and the phone system is using POTS (as opposed to VOIP). They’re concerned that no matter what happens, they have the redundancy of their network. They’re also using software from Computer Associates that does real time monitoring of the network infrastructure.
1 million spectators are expected in Italy and 2 billion are expected to tune in on television.
From what I read, the 2008 Olympics may bring the introduction of an open-source framework to run the IT infrastructure…..