09/15/2021 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 09/14/2021 21:38
With Tokyo 2020 Olympics largely spectator free, athletes took the gold medal for Internet usage on Games network infrastructure, which saw peak traffic dwarfing that of the London Olympics nine years ago.
Speaking at the APNIC 52 conference this week, the Senior Director of ICT Solutions for the Tokyo Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games, Wataru Saito, gave an exclusive behind the scenes look at the seven-year planning and implementation of the games network, as well as how it performed on the big stage.
Wataru explained that 'Internet traffic peaked on the fifth day of the Olympic games at around 20Gbps.' That is nearly three times greater than the London Olympics peak traffic figure. The majority of this, he added, was attributed to '…video streaming from the [Olympic] villages'.
Although the traffic was below what they had planned for, in what has been widely called the most connected Olympic Games in history, it is a credit to the 40-strong local ICT department who racked up some incredible networking achievements in the face of some exceptional challenges.
Supporting the support crew
Planning for Tokyo's 2020 Olympic telecom activities began in 2014, with a 'pre-games network' developed within a year for the organizing committee and organizations involved in the logistics, construction, and servicing of the games (Figure 1).
Although Wataru was not involved in the early stages, he credits advanced planning in forming a strong foundation for designing and migrating to the 'games network', comprised of two networks:
These networks supported facilities such as the IBC as well as the main press centre, athlete villages, user accreditation/uniform centre, main distribution centre, family hotels and organizer offices.
The local ICT department oversaw the planning, installation, and managing of:
The ICT department also provided VPN services for the staff of affiliate organizations when working from home during COVID-19 lockdown, one of the many challenges that they were successfully able to overcome just before the games began.
Engineering cooperation
The one-year postponement and unprecedented scale of the network aside, Wataru noted several other significant hurdles the ICT department had to overcome right up to the opening ceremony.
'We found some audio systems [in the Olympic stadium] had some interference with [an operator's] mobile radio waves during the [opening ceremony] rehearsal,' said Wataru.
'We asked the operator to stop using the radio wave during the event.'
Having these types of conversations with technical partners and sponsors was a regular and, at times, challenging part of Wataru's role. All equipment procurement and system management was managed in-house for the Tokyo Olympics network so sponsor and partner expectations could be managed.
'That is the difficulty of this kind of event,' Wataru said.
To catch up on the presentations at APNIC 52, visit the APNIC 52 conference website.
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