Game on for Colt at Summer Olympics

CEN Feature (Jun 21 2012) Event Related , Regional

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   The Olympics ultimately are a quest to set new records. At the 2012 Summer Olympic Games, that could include record amounts of Carrier Ethernet traffic for London-area service providers.

   Just ask Peter Coppens, network services director at Colt Technology, which has spent the past couple of years preparing for the games. One of Colt’s biggest challenges will be keeping up with the live HD video that its broadcaster customers need to send to a variety of points throughout Europe.

   “I can’t name the customers, but if you think of the main broadcasters and TV channels across Europe and the U.K., those are the ones we’re talking about,” Coppens says. "It’s a nice use of Carrier Ethernet technology. There are not too many competitors that can offer this."

   Colt's video transport service includes Nevion's Ventura platform, which sits at each end of a link to handle all of the coding and transcoding using broadcast-industry protocols. 

   "We can do this on SD, which is mostly bandwidths around 270 Mbps, and we can do HD, where we’re talking about bandwidths around 1.5 Gbps," Coppens says.

   Growth Spurt

   The Colt Games Steering Group prepared partly by studying the impact of recent major events such as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's wedding. By some estimates, the Olympics will increase traffic by 20 percent.

   Colt's preparation included inspecting its entire plant in the vicinity of the Olympic venues because once the games begin on July 27, Colt will have little or no access to its infrastructure. “We brought forward a lot of the maintenance that we needed to do in that area," Coppens says.

   Colt also moved up its schedule for upgrading capacity.

   "There were still some elements of our network that were 1 Gig," Coppens says. "We improved them to 10 Gig. If it was 10 Gig, we’ve been putting in a second 10 Gig [link].”

   Colt isn't concerned about that expensive capacity going underutilized long after the torch is extinguished on Aug. 12. "After the Games, this might provide a bit of a buffer, but over the next few months, it probably will be consumed again by the business-as-usual demands,” Coppens says.

   Colt also stress-tested its internal network because some of its employees will have to work remotely rather than slog through crowded roads, buses and trains. That's one example of the kind of no-stone-unturned preparation that Coppens recommends to his peers in upcoming Olympic host cities such as Sochi, Russia, and Rio de Janeiro. 

   “Start early and take it very seriously," Coppens says. "It’s very much a cross-functional thing.” 

   Setting Priorities

   Colt's Carrier Ethernet network supports many non-venue facilities in and around Olympic sites, such as office buildings and cellular base stations. Many of those customers have upgraded their connections, such as hotels going from 20 Mbps to 50 Mbps because they expect guests to spend a lot of evenings uploading photos and videos from the games.

   “We’ve seen considerable demand from enterprise and wholesale customers to locations that are in or around the Games area," Coppens says. “The link with the Games is not explicit, but it’s very much there.”

   For Colt, one challenge is distinguishing between YouTube-style traffic and business-critical traffic when it's all running over HTTP. “It was easier when you could distinguish on a protocol basis," Coppens says. "Now we have business-critical stuff going over HTTP.”

   Colt responded with application-aware networking (AAN) services. For example, an IP VPN customer could indicate that ERP is a critical application, and Colt would ensure that the IP network resources meet that ERP’s demands. 

   “For example, if a certain branch site is overloaded because people are watching the Games, the AAN can dynamically protect the critical applications running over HTTP,” Coppens says. “It throttles down the non-critical applications, like video over HTTP."

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