Williams Formula 1 increases LAN speed

Williams Formula 1 is to deploy WAN acceleration devices from network provider AT+T to the ends of its MPLS LAN network.

This will in effect increase the group's network speed from 10Mbps to 40Mbps, and will help it optimise its cars in a timely manner.

The move follows a 12-month trial, which saw the acceleration devices as well as the entire LAN, switches, servers and storage transported and set up temporarily at trackside at each of the 18 participating tracks last season.

The race will take place in 20 different countries this year.

The acceleration devices helped the team raise its game in last year's World Championship and will do so again this year.

It has increased the speed at which car performance data is sent back to the engineering team following a trial.

Trials from various countries take place on the Friday and Saturday before the Sunday race.

Once taken, the data is sent back to a team of specialists in Grove, Oxfordshire. These engineers include aerodynamicists, design engineers, hydrologists, and electronics and structural engineers.

The data is analysed using telemetry viewer sofware and the specialist engineers will reconfigure the car where they consider it to be necessary.

Chris Taylor, IT director of Williams F1, said: "The datasets relating to these trials are big – approximately 100MB.

"With the 40Mbps LAN [without the accelerators], it used to take us an hour to transfer this data to our Oxford headquarters, but the acceleration devices now mean it takes two minutes.

"Time is often tight – we might need to reconfigure the car in lots of ways and only have a day or two in which to assess this."

The team comprises one trackside IT engineer, as well as five IT support technicians based in Oxfordshire.