You could hear the disappointment from here. A hundred press releases being shredded, a thousand articles ready to “click to publish” left languishing on the “Why oh Why” shelf, and all because the mobile and wireless networks at the London 2012 Olympic Games, and across London, seem to be standing up to scrutiny.
Yes, shock and horror, the predicted meltdown didn’t melt and the networks, over the first week, have kept visitors merrily tweeting, and in some cases streaming video of other events, as they walk around the Park, sit in the aquatics centre, and so on.
Granted, there was a slight hiccough with the road race cycling, but let’s be clear about this one. Data from competitors' bikes was supposed to be sent, in M2M fashion, over GPRS to the broadcasters, who would then be able to tell us just how much the Manx flyer, Mark Cavendish, was not going to win by. Unfortunately, the cycling was not taking place at any of the heavily over-engineered London city venues but down in far-flung Surrey (note to non UK readers, Surrey is not really far-flung), where of course there was only “normal” capacity. Given the thousands around the roads, the bike location data wasn’t getting through.
All it took was one official to suggest that attendees might want to take it easy on the tweeting, and we had our first “mobile networks can’t cope” story of the Games. On inspection, though, it was all a bit making a mountain out of a BoxHill, and more of an organisational foul-up (the network in question had not been told they would need to provide guaranteed data access for the bike data) than an outright fail.
That said, though, there seems to have been little else for those waiting for a network fail to get their teeth into. You can bet that any company with any skin this game is sitting ready with a rapid response, a pre-written "Network operators should have installed more small cells/big cells/backhaul/signalling/delete as appropriate" opinion. But wailing of teeth came there none. That’s not to say nobody was trying for a little Olympic leverage, however.
Arieso and O2 seem to have waited until they were reasonably sure things were going OK to share the info that the operator has been using Arieso’s software to fine tune its network.
Network assurance company CommProve had gone to the trouble of commissioning a survey into users’ expectations of the coverage they would receive at major sporting events. It found that on the whole the British are a gloomy lot when it comes to their expectations of mobile network service quality at major events. But that tells us more about a) the British national character and b) past experience than the current Olympics experience.
Tekelec sent something over about “So far so good”, admitting that things had gone quite well, but if you wanted to read something about outages and so on, then here’s a white paper. Not only that, but Tekelec took the view that the Olympics is a precursor of what all demand will be like all of the time. That’s all fine if you think operators are in a position to saturate every last nook with dedicated WiFi and, as in the case of the athletes’ village, hundreds of femtocells. Perhaps they are. In which case, the lasting legacy of these Games might be: Buy Backhaul Futures (and signalling, Tekelec, and signalling).
One legacy that may be lacking is the lack of progress on contactless payments, and especially mobile contactless. Try as Visa might, the Games have not acted as the spur they might have to drive a contactless acceptance infrastructure (that’s POS contactless terminals) across London. Yes, there’s contactless at the venues, where these things can be closely managed, but little across the rest of London as a result of the Olympics. This seems to be a slightly sore subject in some areas. One exec we spoke to (not at Visa) told us that he wasn’t allowed to discuss the Olympics.
But the fact is, over two years ago Visa was telling us that London 2012 would bring about the first mass market deployment in Europe of mobile NFC payments. It hasn’t, proving that although the IoC can close down sections of the busiest traffic routes in Europe (not necessarily a bad thing, by the way) and rigidly enforce sponsorship and branding regulations, even the Olympics could not unravel the Gordian knot of bank-card-payment provider-operator-device maker that makes up the mobile payments landscape.
So, NFC aside, I’m very sorry if you had been hoping for an Olympics network disaster, but it’s been so far, so good, as Tekelec catchily told us. Let’s hope for a good old fashioned outage next week, eh?
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe