The 2004 Summer Olympic Games, August 13-29, involves 10,500 athletes from a record 202 nations, 45,000 volunteers, 301 medal ceremonies and an estimated ticketed attendance of 5.3 million. The Paralympic Games runs Sept. 17-28 and covers 19 sports in more than 20 venues involving 4,000 athletes.
The Games in Athens, Greece must provide secure, reliable communications to athletes, trainers, media representatives and spectators via cellular, WiFi, microwave, fiber and DSL as well as secure communications for different agencies around the world.
NBC Olympics and AT&T Wireless will offer customers the most extensive collection of Olympic Games content ever available. It will include on-air text message polling, video highlight clips, mobile access to television listings and results, alerts, trivia, an exclusive sweepstakes, and more. Real-time interaction with the Olympic Games using a variety of messaging and mMode services for alerts, schedules and results.
Olympic coverage is available from the BBC, NBC Sports, CBS Sports, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, Yahoo Sports and others. Venue maps include Satellite views and free GPS Maps.
Olympic WiFi service will not be provided by the IOC. The potential security risks of WiFi have made IT planners decide that only traditional wide-area networks and ip-based local networks should be used.
Cellular providers may take up some of the slack.
- Acotel Group and the Associated Press will deliver AP Olympics Online to U.S. cellular subscribers.
- DoCoMo will set up temporary 3G base stations in Athens, from July 30 to September 30, 2004 enabling FOMA subscribers attending the competition to enjoy the service with the same handsets they are currently using in Japan.
- Cosmote Mobile Telecommunications, an official Olympic sponsor, plans to showcase its third-generation mobile service, introduced in May, which offers video calls and Internet browsing. They have invested more than $62 million, to upgrade its mobile phone infrastructure in Athens, the surrounding Attica region and the five other Olympic cities in time for the Games.
- A multilingual tourist guide cellphone service from Cosmote, using voice-recognition and location-based technology, will give users details about restaurants, beaches, archaeological sites, museums, theater shows, transportation schedules and emergency phone numbers.
- Samsung will supply the Athens Organizing Committee and about 14,00 VIPs with a mobile phone for real-time scoring, event timetables and logistics, said Jay Choi, Samsung s Olympic technology director.
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) awarded Schlumberger the contract to manage IT resources for the games. Philipps is the chief technology integrator for Schlumberger and has the contract to organise IT resources for the Olympics.
The system being built by Philipps will include some 10,000 desktop PCs and 850 servers. To avoid the possibility of a glitch in the Greek electricity network causing chaos, diesel generators are being deployed to complement uninterruptible power supplies.
The company has implemented an identity and access management system for the Athens games, combining a physical ID badge and scanning system with back-office database applications.
Olympic organizers are concerned about viruses and worm attacks that could cripple the Olympics’ data network.
While there may not be official WiFi access, private enterprise is supplying WiFi around the region.
- WeRoam and Boingo are launching WiFi services in Greece in a cooperation agreement with the leading wireless provider in Greece, OTEnet. Billing is pooled together on the mobile phone invoice and is taken care of by the user’s own mobile provider.
OTEnet, a Greek pioneer of WLAN and going under the brand name of “OnWireless”, operates Wi-Fi hotspots in hotels, congress centres and airports for public wireless access to the Internet. In Athens this network includes for instance “Eleftherios Venizelos” international airport, the “Aegli” Conference Centre and well-known hotels such as the “Caravel” and the “Apollon Palace”.
- OTE has deployed an ADSL system serving 16 points in Athens. Using the network, all Olympic facilities, including the main venues, international broadcasting centres, news centres and the press village will be able to access broadband Internet services throughout the event.
- The ACISgroup is deploying the Proxim ORiNOCO AP-2500 access points for hotspots at smaller hotels; and combining the new ORiNOCO AP-4000 access points and AP-600 access points with the Nomadix Universal Subscriber Gateway II and the HotSpot Gateway at larger venues.
From microchips on marathon runners’ shoes to ultrasensitive touch pads in the pool, there’s a 007 trove of gadgetry behind the Games to help separate the Olympic medal-winners from the also-rans. Sensors embedded inside the starting block record when a swimmer leaves, and an ultrathin plastic touchpad on the wall under the water can calculate within hundredths of a second when the swimmer lands. Bicyclists use a transponder clipped to a spoke on their front wheel to record their finish time. It sends signals from the bike to antennae along the route so judges can confirm who is in first. As the runners cross the finish line, cameras capture their bodies in a series of thousands of minuscule bits, first photographing the tip of the toe, then the finger, then the tip of the nose, with resolution so fine it can pick up the hair on runners’ bodies. Radar guns check speed on beach volleyball.
The International Broadcast Center will be the focal point of activity for about 10,000 producers, directors, editors, managers and volunteers from around the globe who are responsible for putting the games on the air. Athens Olympic Broadcasting will provide rights holders at the IBC with about 3,500 hours of footage during the Olympics, which they will transmit to their home audiences via satellite and fiber optic cable.
“Simulcam” is one of NBC’s tricks to spice up Olympic coverage; it was used in the winter olympics to see skiers go head-to-head in a virtual race and is being used for diving and other events in 2004. StroMotion leaves a strobe trail. Dartfish software makes it happen. If CBS had the franchise for the Olympics, their patented “Eyevision“, might have been utilized. Developed at Carnegie Mellon, it produces a “Matrix” 360 fly-around effect and was premiered at the SuperBowl a few years ago.
The International Olympic Committee reports that TV rights account for 50% of Olympic revenue. In Sydney, Olympic broadcast revenue was $1.3 billion. In Greece, the IOC expects it will increase to $1.4 billion.
Americans looking for live coverage of the Olympics online are out of luck although NBC will show delayed highlights of the games through its website. Coverage will appear online only after it is broadcast. The service is free but users are still obliged to verify their identity using a Visa credit card. US residents with only Mastercard credit cards won’t be able to access the service.
Streaming video will be offered by more than 12 broadcasters (mainly in Europe) via the Internet but International Olympic Committee rules mean that this content can only be offered to users in each TV station’s home country. So BBC coverage, for example, will not be available to viewers outside the country. Websites must use technology to block viewers from outside their home countries.
The 17-day Olympic TV coverage consists of 1,210 hours of digital content, shot at 38 sites, broadcast over six NBC-owned networks, including Bravo, CNBC, MSNBC, Telemundo, and USA Network. About one-third of those hours will be stored in high-definition format, which uses files from five to ten times the size of standard broadcast video.
NBC film editors and producers have to go through around 70 hours of content per day to put together the evening broadcast. NBC uses three Isilon IQ 2250 clusters of 11-Tbytes each. One cluster sits in the the International Broadcast Center (IBC) and is used to encode and store video into a lower-resolution 1.5-Mbit/s format. The two other Isilon IQ clusters are located on-site at the track and field and gymnastic venues. Editors meta-tag and index the video on a Blue Order Media Archive asset management system connected to each Isilon IQ cluster.
There will be seven security personnel for each athlete competing at the games.
A massive security network is protecting the games. It gathers images and audio from an electronic web of over 1,000 high-resolution and infrared cameras, 12 patrol boats, 4,000 vehicles, nine helicopters, a sensor-laden blimp and four mobile command centers.
NATO s AWACS radar aircraft (left) is patroling Greek airspace.
All calls made from mobile and landline phones in the area will be recorded and processed using software provided by UK company Autonomy. Conversations can be converted into text and scanned for phrases that could be linked to terrorist activity. Spoken words are collected by the cameras which also utilize image recognition.
Olympic security has stretched resources to the limit in Greece, which is spending a record $1.5 billion on protecting the games. Athens’ massive surveillance grid, with 1,300 cameras, spy vans, underwater sensors, chemical “sniffers” and an airship, is at the heart of the security program designed by Science Applications International (SAIC), which is heading the security contract.
At the rear end of the blimp’s gondola sit two surveillance operators, one controlling a powerful zoom camera with a joystick. The spectral imaging computer screen is even more sophisticated. The Littoral Airborne Sensor Hyperspectral (LASH) system breaks down real-time photographs of the environment into colour-based algorithms, which can highlight unusual changes.
Last October, when the Pentagon used surveillance aircraft to hunt the Washington snipers, a similar system was deployed to look for a change in colours caused by sniper gunfire. Within seconds of spotting such a change, the blimp could relay exact Global Positioning System co-ordinates to police on the ground.
The Navy wants every big city in the United States to be watched over by three gigantic dirigibles, each to be shared between federal and state agencies such as the police but redeployed by the Navy in case of a terrorist emergency.
The blimps will not come cheap. Defence contractors estimate that a fully-equipped airship costs in the region of $12 million, meaning that any city requiring 24-hour eagle-eye surveillance from a blimp would have to pay close to $40 million for three of them (two to take it in turns to fly, the other to stand in during maintenance work).
The Pentagon has asked several defence contractors to develop a giant unmanned gasbag that would be able to hover for months at 70,000 ft, carrying more than 4,000lb of an unspecified payload.
Related blimp articles in Dailywireless include; Stratellite Test Successful, Stratellite Sold, Sky High WiFi, Battle Blimps, Internet Blimps in UK and Welcome Interstate Managers.
