Fifa network demands World Cup performance

With the world’s eyes focussed on events on Germany’s football pitches, viewers could be forgiven for overlooking the voice and data network that connects Fifa staff in each stadium to the information they need to keep the tournament on track.

Building a large-scale, resilient IP network connecting the 12 host stadiums to each other and the internet was a big task.

The supplier, IP telephony specialist Avaya (also one of the World Cup sponsors), had to wait until the end of Germany’s domestic football season before it could install the necessary equipment at the stadiums, though this gave it ample time to thoroughly test the system in the labs, said Doug Gardiner, managing director of Avaya’s World Cup program.

“We’ve had some minor cabling issues and some misconnections, but most of the equipment has been working since the middle of April,” said Gardiner.

Avaya also built the infrastructure to support the World Cup in Japan four years ago, and has invested around £25m in equipment for the two tournaments in total.

Each of the German stadiums has been fitted with around 1,000 data ports (more in the larger stadiums at Berlin and Munich where Fifa’s headquarters are also housed), as well as 300 to 400 IP telephones. Wireless connectivity is provided by 802.11g access points covering some, but not all, areas of the stadiums.

“There are two primary technical areas which represent the heart of the network, which are physically located on different sides of each stadium. If there is some sort of disaster like a fire, it wouldn’t affect operations,” said Gardiner. Similar attention has been paid to ensure a degree of failover and redundancy on the wide area network (WAN) connections.

“They’re all fibre connections, either single or multimode, between the routers and the core data switches, depending on what’s in the stadium. Each stadium has two different 34Mbit/s WAN pipes coming from two separate telephone exchanges and cable trenches,” said Gardiner.

Avaya supplied the media gateways and IP handsets to support telephony, as well as the wireless access points, but it partnered with Juniper Networks for the firewalls that control user access and authentication. Extreme Networks provided the backbone LAN switches that link the stadiums to each other via Deutsche Telekom’s network.

A degree of mobility is provided by Citrix smartphone applications, one of which allows score updates to be pushed onto the screen of the Avaya IP handsets. Polycom provides desktop video conferencing applications, and Aimetis software links 80 IP security cameras across the network.

The bulk of network traffic is for user PCs accessing web-based applications stored on central servers, and the results information system. On top of that, up to 200,000 Fifa staff and other users need to be accredited to use the system for email, internet access and VoIP calls.

The network was carrying over 4.2TB of data a week before the tournament started, and Gardiner estimated that the final figure could be in excess of 20TB by the time one of the 32 teams lifts the cup.