(More pictures here.)
The most watched World Cup ever will be seen by three million spectators and a global TV audience of over three billion. But while the football is the flesh of the event, the skeleton is equally as fascinating. For the first time, communication for the entire World Cup is using a converged IP network. An incredible 15TB of converged voice and data traffic will pass through the servers during the tournament including the data to fulfil FIFA’s requirement that every one of the three million tickets has an RFID chip inside. For the record, that means you can’t fold and put them in a pocket, so you have to walk around outside the ground gingerly clutching your ticket.
We attended a press conference held by FIFA and its partners in Munich on Saturday to look at the behind the scenes work by Toshiba and Avaya and the other FIFA partners.
Peter Meyer, head of IT for FIFA in Munich, said the tournament is “a unique networking challenge.” And no wonder; “the network has to be built over a period of four weeks or so.” Each stadium had to be wired up after its German league fixtures had finished. And it had to be right. As Meyer points out, during the tournament isn’t exactly the best time to make a mistake.
Avaya probably isn’t the best-known of FIFA’s 15 official partners for the tournament. Spun off from Lucent Technologies in 2000, the US company is the only business-to-business sponsor for the tournament. Its role might be purely behind-the-scenes but it hopes that brand recognition from the World Cup will help it to secure new business.
Mind-boggling
The company provides the network infrastructure to power all the different World Cup locations with data and voice. And that doesn’t just include the stadia. There are a total of 25 primary locations including dignitary hotels, the FIFA base in Berlin, the press offices, the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC) in Munich and the connections to Deutsche Telecom’s data centre and also to Yahoo! - the web giant runs fifaworldcup.com.
Wi-Fi is used primarily for net access and is provided by Avaya at all locations, but for other data reliability is key, so cabling has been used extensively; 8,000 kilometres to be precise. Then there are places such as the helpdesks greeting travellers at airports. These were a particular problem, since non-technical volunteers simply needed to be able to plug the desks into a DSL connection and have voice and data instantly. Each location has an IP phone with access to a phone directory via each phone’s LCD screen. There are 40,000 network connections and 3,000 telephones serving 50,000 staff. As well as the main broadcasting base in Munich, each stadium also has a media centre, with 15,000 journalists also plugging into the network during the tournament.
As mobility sponsor Tosh has provided 3,500 Tecra notebooks for the event so stadium managers and other staff can hook up on the move. Since first becoming a FIFA partner in 2001, Toshiba has become the preferred supplier of all FIFA’s mobile machines.Manuel Linnig, EMEA Marketing Manager for Toshiba, said “a lot of people move round at the games, in and between the stadiums.” So what of security? “We have several security features, including fingerprint readers."
Meyer says this is the first tournament where photographers have been able to instantly send their pictures back to the Media Centre via wireless: “pictures can be uploaded to FIFAWorldCup.com in seconds” he points out.
The command centre
In Munich Avaya has four rack units of servers next to its 12-man IT Command Centre (ITCC). The ITCC is inside the IBC, which takes up two halls of an anonymous exhibition centre outside of Munich. We need to go through a full security check to get in. The IBC is the hub of everything at the World Cup and is fed by a ‘satellite field’, rows of sat trucks sat inside a perimeter fence. Each broadcaster has production facilities here, with pictures coming from Host Broadcast Services (HBS). The amount of cabling around the place is phenomenal, with each broadcaster – and the ITCC – having specially built quarters inside wood huts that are variously edit suites, production offices and radio studios. While there, we saw Rodney Marsh stroll in for his TalkSport show. This is where the action really does happen.
The ITCC is fascinating. The server numbers are boggling – 70 servers run the event, with full backups in other locations in case of problem. Douglas Gardner, Managing Director of the FIFA World Cup for Avaya, says that “as yet there had been no security issues at all” which, he added, was pleasing: “there were a number of issues in Japan and South Korea [the 2002 World Cup], and at the Confederations Cup last year in Germany where some people tried to get in.” The technicians in the ITCC (and in Austin, Texas out of hours) can pinpoint the location of any network problems or intrusions. As we’re now at the end of the group stages, stadiums will begin to be decommissioned, in itself a massive job.
What next?
Both Avaya and Toshiba end their phase of FIFA sponsorship after the end of this World Cup Gardner says he’d like to be a supplier to the 2010 games in South Africa, but for Toshiba it looks like this is the end of the road. FIFA is cutting down from 15 partners for each World Cup to a core of just 5 for the next two tournaments. And the digital partner for 2010 and 2014 is Sony. Going to the World Cup provides a glimpse of just how corporate such events now are: Toshiba isn’t allowed to use their own LCD displays inside their hospitality suites since it’s only the mobility sponsor. Philips are the Consumer Electronics sponsors and so it’s the Dutch firm that supplies the LCDs.
What’s sure is that 2010 will represent even more of a challenge in terms of networking the event; South Africa’s net infrastructure is nowhere near as advanced, not least in terms of DSL useage. Meyer refuses to be drawn on how difficult the task will be. The look on his face reveals more than words can say.
More pictures here.
