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Networking Wireless Networking

Inside the Massive 2014 Winter Olympics WiFi Network 107

alphadogg writes "Engineers are putting the final touches on a network capable of handling up to 54Tbps of traffic when the Winter Olympics opens on Feb. 7 in the Russian city of Sochi. The two locations where the Olympics will take place — the Olympic village in Sochi and a tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains — are completely new construction, so this project represents a greenfield environment for Avaya, the company heading up the project. In addition to investing in a telecom infrastructure, Russia is spending billions of dollars to upgrade Sochi's electric power grid, its transportation system and even its sewage treatment facilities."
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Inside the Massive 2014 Winter Olympics WiFi Network

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  • by xmas2003 ( 739875 ) * on Monday December 16, 2013 @06:28PM (#45709357) Homepage
    Here's the 3 page article on one ad-free page. [networkworld.com]

    They are claiming it will handle 54 Tbps of network traffic ... up from the Vancouver games four years ago that was only 4 Tbps. One interesting tidbit is the ratio of wired to wireless traffic was 4-to-1 back then ... they expect that ratio to be reversed this time ... with 2,000 802.11n access points!

    That a bit more bandwidth than this Christmas website has ... HO-HO-HO! ;-) [komar.org]

    • by fisted ( 2295862 )
      +1 clever
  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Monday December 16, 2013 @06:38PM (#45709431) Homepage Journal

    It will be totally pwned by Russian black-hat hackers.

    They will have a feeding frenzy of personal details, photos and of course the credit card numbers of anyone who makes a purchase there.

    In Soviet Russia credit comes to YOU!

    • I expect Edward Snowden will do some consulting work and make it easy for us to get the data from the IOC officials and their sponsors (bribers).

    • That should be modded insightful, not funny...

  • No public access? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Monday December 16, 2013 @06:38PM (#45709433)
    There doesn't seem to any provision for the fans. I glean this from two statements:

    The Sochi network will serve 30,000 athletes, administrators and staff, media, IOC officials, and volunteers with data, voice, video, and full Internet access through the Games sites.

    And secondly:

    In Sochi, Avayaâ(TM)s Wi-Fi network will be split into five virtual SSID-based networks. There will be one network for the athletes, two for media (one free, one paid), one for Olympics staff, and one for dignitaries.

    So it sounds like this network will be just to support the games themselves, not for the general public.

  • Misleading article is misleading. The entire network itself handles 54Tbps. The WiFi network, to quote TFA, "will be distributed using about 2,000 802.11n access points across the Olympics Game sites; including inside the stands for the first time."

    Not even 802.11ac.
    • I noticed that, too. Assuming both 5Ghz and 2.4 Ghz radios at 450mbit each, you have 900 mbit per AP, X 2000, so 1.8 Tbit.

      That, however, won't be the bottleneck. TFA says all of this has to go through redundant 10Gbit Internet connections. Maybe that means 20Gbit, and maybe a lot of the content will be local.

      My bet, though, is that the bottleneck will be the Internet pipe if any slowness is detected. Depending on how many people live-stream video or have their devices set to auto-upload pictures and video t

      • I noticed that, too. Assuming both 5Ghz and 2.4 Ghz radios at 450mbit each, you have 900 mbit per AP, X 2000, so 1.8 Tbit.

        Have you assumed that radio waves are not TRANSVERSAL? Your 450 mbit are marketing and PR feces bovi. The nominal speed of 802.11n in 20 MHz band is 75 mbit/s. It's doubled when you use 40 MHz band and doubled once more when you use MIMO 2x2. But there are only 2 orthogonal polarizations, say, vertical and horizontal, so MIMO 3x3 will not give you anything valuable, except, may be, ability to use vertical polarization omni and 2 separate horizontals for all sides.

        Then, remember that a normal cellular GSM st

        • So, we agree that their 54Tbps number is total bullshit. :)

          I was giving the marketing BS just to be generous. Of course, you will never really see 900mbit on every AP, or even a single AP, for all the reasons you mention and because they will never have a perfect 50/50 split of clients that are all evenly spread out among all of the access points.

          I'm on your side. They claim 54Tbps, I say that 1.8Tbps is the *theoretical* max, and the practical Internet limit is 20Gbps, and now your talking about the real-w

    • While I'd assume some of the connectivity is contained within the site and some within Russia itself, these are international games and you'd presume a large chunk of the traffic is destined for destinations outside of Russia.

  • CATV HFC network works better for broadcast and if they have it as clear QAM then you don't need set top boxes with most HD tv's.

  • “We have built the TOCs in separate locations to ensure redundancy in the case of a natural disaster or man-made incident,” says Frohwerk. “Should the Adler TOC go down, we would simply send the next shift to the Sochi TOC and carry on.”

    So if a TOC is blown up, they'll just send the next shift to the other TOC and continue? Ummmm....

  • This story should be removed from slashdot. It is just some made up news to attract attention to the worst Olympic Winter Games ever. As they say in marketing "any news is good news". Boycott the Mafia Olympics, they are just the propaganda games of a mafia state, build with the dirty money of oligarchs, to praise a dictator. Not to much different than the Nazi Olympics from 1936 when Hitler was parading his fascist state. Russian government not only discriminates against gays but also against ethnic min

    • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

      It's fun to watch all the russophobes crawl out of their holes for this.

    • Russian government not only discriminates against gays but also against ethnic minorities, majority of the Sochi staff are Russians from Moscow or Sankt-Peterburg and non Russian local people from Sochi.

      Russian government discriminates against ethnical MAJORITY - Russians. I don't care about Olympic staff. I care about lots of other places where inhabitants of Russian Caucasus, for instance, get 2 years of home arrest for murder while Russians get 10 years of Special Regime. I care about Stavropol territory where there is a second Kosovo, with Chechens (Remember Tsarnaev?) occupy traditionally Russian territories. I care about ethnical Chechen criminal organizations openly bearing arms in Moscow where Russ

  • Are we gonna have to suffer every commentator struggling to mispronounce Krasnaya Polyana instead of using the most obvious straight-forward translation "red valley"?
  • tight cluster of Alpine venues in the nearby Krasnaya Polyana Mountains

    I am sure this is a typo, but I thought it funny. According to dictionary.com, if the word Alpine has a capitol A, it means either 1)of, pertaining to, on, or part of the Alps or 2) of or pertaining to downhill skiing or a competitive downhill skiing event.

    Down further in the page:
    1. of or relating to the Alps or their inhabitants
    2. geology
    a. of or relating to an episode of mountain building in the Tertiary period during which the Alps were formed

    As the article is

  • There are some questions TFA doesn't answer.

    • * Where does the 54tbps number come from? I'm skeptical this is anything other than internal. It might be their switching setup's theoretical max, but even if every one of the 120,000 wireless clients pushed the theoretical 300mbps of 802.11n, that's still only about 35tbps. Overkill, okay, but without knowing what the 54tbps stat refers to, it doesn't really say much.
    • * There's an airport in Sochi. Why truck crucial equipment, especially if the roads are bad?
    • * Ok

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