So the London 2012 Olympic Games have come to an end. A spectacular closing ceremony last night – with music, song, dance, awe-inspiring stadium lighting and fireworks that made up the greatest show on earth – brought the past two […]
#London2012
The past two weeks of the London 2012 Olympic Games have certainly been a time of drama, high emotion, success and failure, and a general lifting of the spirits to witness such displays of intense effort and much achievement by […]
So the kerfuffle over Twitter’s suspension of journalist Guy Adams’ account has ended, with the company reinstating it and issuing an apology of sorts. Adams, the Los Angeles-based correspondent for The Independent newspaper, had been posting a series of tweets […]
#OpeningCeremony – 9:00pm UK July 27, 2012. Experience it live (or go here if you’re in the US). #London2012 | #Olympics
What’s funny to you or I may not be to anyone else. Case in point – SpecSavers‘ press ad in the UK today over the Korean flag mixup at #London2012. I can see the humour certainly. But I wonder how […]
Reuters reports that Anthony Edgar, head of media operations for the International Olympic Committee (IOC), freely admits that he does not know what to expect at the London Olympic Games following the explosion of social media, with some 900 million […]
Whatever else is going on about the London 2012 Olympics – border control nightmares at Heathrow, cracks in the M4 motorway, cellular network outages, not enough security staff – it looks like mainstream broadcast media have things well under control […]
O2’s total outage during the past 24 hours has raised questions about the readiness of the UK’s telecoms infrastructure ahead of the London Olympics, according to analyst firm Ovum.
“The huge influx of visitors to London ahead of the games will cause network traffic spikes, putting pressure on the UK’s mobile networks which already have a poor reputation compared to others in Western Europe,” said Steven Hartley, practice leader, Ovum Telecoms Strategy in an Ovum comment email. “While UK mobile operators claim to be prepared, they have not yet given indication of the scale of their plans.”
Is it fair to associate O2’s problems with speculation about what it may bode for the London Olympic Games? Probably not, yet it’s not encouraging at all to see a cellular network outage on such a huge scale just two weeks before the start of those games.
The bigger connectivity picture gives you more pause for thought, as a BBC report suggests:
[…] Analysts estimate this year’s Olympics will be the most data-heavy yet – with some 60Gb, the equivalent of 3,000 photographs, travelling across the network in the Olympic Park every second.
[…] To cope with the number of extra visitors to London during the Games, BT has been busy placing additional wi-fi hot spots around the capital. There will more than 500,000 hot spots, it says, mostly in the centre, which should make life easier for visitors from abroad keen to save on their roaming charges.
[…] So 300,000 people have tickets to an afternoon session and they are on their way down, and another 150,000 people coming from the Games – and they all come up at the same time. If they come up near a hot spot, all is fine. But then they will disperse, and suddenly you get people in other places, and that is a concern – when they spread along two or three mobile masts, will these masts be capable of handling that concentration of traffic?
Yet this is not all to be concerned about two weeks before the start of the 2012 Olympic Games.
There’s more – Heathrow airport, the M4 motorway and event security – and it’s not good at all.
The London 2012 Olympics are just twenty-five days away. In the UK, the BBC has started building a sense of excitement… Check everything the BBC is planning for this global event. Reshared post from +BBC News The BBC has just […]
Change just one letter and it becomes a universal story. Reshared post from +Vic Gundotra This is how to tell a story. Congratulations to P&G on what I think is the best ad I’ve seen this year. Google+: Reshared 1 […]
Reuters reports that 70,000 unpaid volunteers recruited for the London Olympics this summer have been warned not to give away breaking news about athletes or disclose the location of politicians and celebrities through online comments or pictures posted on social […]