History in the making

26 May 2010

The countdown to the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is underway and BT has a key role to play

With the Opening Ceremony of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games just over two years away, BT is well on the way to putting in place the communications infrastructure that will make sure the world doesn't miss a single second of the action.

BT has already delivered a number of important milestones including the development of preliminary fixed and mobile network design. We have set up a permanent presence at LOCOG's (the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games) offices. The office of LOCOG's technology team at 25 Canada Square in London's Canary Wharf was in fact the first venue to go live. Although not a competition site, it provided an early demonstration of BT's communications services capability.

A complex challenge

The London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games will feature more than 14,000 athletes from 200 countries competing in nearly 700 events. So staging the games represents one of the most complex logistical challenges BT has ever faced.

BT will carry every image, sports report and visit to the London 2012 Games web site together with millions of calls, emails and text messages.

Transmitting the equivalent of 6,000 novels per second

To put this into perspective, there will be 14,000 cable TV outlets, 20,000 accredited media personnel and Live Site screens in city centres up and down the country. This all adds up to an estimated six gigabytes of information carried every single second. That's roughly the equivalent of the words in 6,000 novels or the music in 17 mp3 albums.

Connecting the whole of the UK

Of course, work is not just focused on the capital city. As well as a massive fibre ring connecting the Olympic Park in London, communications arteries will reach as far as Hampden Park in the north, the Millennium Stadium in the west, Weymouth in the south, and Hadleigh Farm in the east – a total of 94 separate competition and non-competition venues throughout the UK. All are joined together with enough cable to stretch halfway from Beijing to London, or more than 100 times the length of the marathon.

In addition, BT will install 80,000 connections across the 94 venues. There will be 1,000 wireless access points, 16,500 telephone lines and 14,000 mobile phone SIM cards.

The work to support the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games is equivalent to BT installing a complete new town's worth of telecommunications infrastructure in a little over three years. Projects of this scale come along once in a lifetime and we are proud to be able to help people all over the world watch, hear and read about history in the making.