Q&A with BT's Tim Boden, Business Director, London 2012 Programme

As the official communications services partner for the London 2012 Olympic Games, BT is tasked with the planning, design and rollout of a network that will support one of the world's largest and most popular sporting events.

This will see about 80,000 connections, 4,500km of cabling, 1,800 wireless access points and 60GB of information a second over the network. Not a small task by any stretch.

Tim Boden, business director at BT for the London 2012 Programme, met with Computing last week at a test event for women's volleyball in London to talk about both his own and BT's role in the games.

Boden has been working on the Olympics for four and a half years, and even helped secure the sponsorship for BT by leading the bid team.

He has since led many of the technical aspects of the implementation.

Why did BT want to be part of the Games?

One of the main draws for us was the internal benefit to BT. We are using the Games to motivate staff and have many different reward schemes associated with the run-up to London 2012.

Another aspect is marketing. We will increasingly run campaigns, both in the consumer and the business space, around the Olympics.

In the business space, we are focused on additional services our customers might need as there are likely to be problems around such things as staff mobility. We plan to launch a whole set of services around this.

We are also looking to create a stream of consultancy or delivery revenues. We have been involved in other Olympics and Commonwealth Games and learned a hell of a lot about how a game comes together, we plan to exploit that.

Is the network complete?

Not yet. We have got a rolling programme of test events right through to next year.

We have so far connected about 25 locations onto the network. In total we have about 70, which means we are a third of the way through.

The test events started on the spring bank holiday.

How do the test events work? What is being tested?

We are testing the ability of the LOCOG organisation to operate the actual sport. It's not testing in the true sense of the word - it's not like we don't know whether it works or not. It's actually about ensuring the operational processes perform perfectly in a live environment.

You have got a lot of people that haven't worked together before, all of the sponsors coming together, and so the tests have been more about working out how all the organisations should come together to deliver an event.

We started planning just before the Beijing Olympics. The big milestone from my perspective was that we had to have the design complete two years before the games begin (Aug/Sept 2010). As a result the designs are fairly fixed.

All the work up to that point had been about designing the network. However, since then, we have been testing the functionality of the network in our own testing environments. There is an integration test lab, this is where Atos put all of their games applications together, and where we test all of the network functions.

Do you get much information from the previous events about how to improve things this time around?

To a certain extent. The Olympics are inherently conservative, and the one question I get asked the most is "What new technology are you putting in?". The reality is we aren't putting much new stuff in. Rule number one is you only use things that are tried and tested. There is nothing we are putting in that wasn't in service two years prior to the Games.

How do you monitor the traffic during game time?

We have created a technical operations centre, which will have about 50 people in during games time. That has the ability to monitor the games-specific equipment that we put out there. All the LAN switches are visible, and it will even produce temperature alarms during sporting events. All the kit that's dedicated to the games is managed from there.

The way you drive the service with an Olympic Games is different from if you were doing it for a normal organisation. If this was any other service we wouldn't have dedicated staff at every site. If we had a problem we might have four or five hours to fix it and we would send somebody out with the requisite spares.

It doesn't work like this with the Games. For example, if there was a problem with the LAN switches and one breaks we have only got an hour to fix it. You can't get people and spares inside the boundary within an hour, so we have to have spares for all our kit, and trained and skilled staff inside the venues. There will be approximately 900 dedicated staff for this during the games.

I worked out the maths once, we might get 10 LAN switches, out of a possible population of 3,000, fail during the Olympics. Most of what we do is designed to be fault tolerant and resilient wherever possible – it's just there are some places you can't guarentee that.

What is BT's plan for creating a legacy after the games?

The Olympic village will become housing after the games, rather than a generic sort of venue type service. We have therefore put fibre to the premise type broadband into the village. This means that when the residents take over, they will effectively have fibre-based broadband services. That's a direct legacy of the games.

I guess what will happen in the rest of the park depends on who the legacy customer is. You hear lots of rumours but I don't think there is anything confirmed yet. If it's a customer that can use a lot of communications services we would hope to support them.