BT's London 2012 delivery programme: three years to go

With three year’s to go to the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games, BT’s London 2012 delivery programme team is on target to deliver the communications services for the Games.

We have already delivered a number of key contractual milestones including the telecoms master schedule, which sets out the agreed delivery dates for our communications services. We also completed the development of preliminary fixed and mobile design earlier this year in April.

We have set up a permanent presence at LOCOG’s (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games) offices, ensuring that as a team we are well placed to work with our London 2012 partners. In addition, we’ve completed our network equipment partner selection.

During the summer months, we presented our service strategy to LOCOG. We have also maintained a programme of knowledge transfer sessions with partners for other Olympic and Paralympic Games such as Bell Canada, the telecommunications partner for the Vancouver 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

Coming up in the next three months are a number of additional milestones for the team, including the high-level service design completion. Late this year following approval of the design, the first venue to go live will be LOCOG’s headquarters at 1 Churchill Place, London. Although this is a non-competition site, it will provide an early demonstration of our communications services capability.

So what is BT providing in it’s role as official communications services partner for London 2012:

• 80,000 connections across 94 different venues
• 4,500km of cabling
• 1000 wireless access points
• 16,500 telephones
• 14,000 mobile phone SIM cards

We’re enabling 6Gb of information to be carried each second, roughly the equivalent of the words in 6,000 novels or the music in 17 mp3 albums.

In total this equates to 632,000 hours of effort, and there will be over 600 people supporting the communications services in Games time, including 400 on-site staff to meet service levels.

Stuart Hill, Vice President and Director for the London 2012 Games Delivery Programme in BT Global Services,