Inside the Massive 2014 Winter Olympics WiFi Network

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."

Comments

Complete article on one ad-free page

[xmas2003]

Here's the 3 page article on one ad-free page.

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! ;-)

No public access?

[timeOday]

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.

The bigotry of the political correctness crowd.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a lesbian (yes, some of us do browse Slashdot), I find the attitudes of the political correctness crowd far more distasteful than the attitudes of the Russians in this matter.

It's very hypocritical for the politically correct crowd to clamor on about how bad discrimination is, but in doing so they end up discriminating against those who wish to hold viewpoints that may be considered controversial. The political correctness crowd's attempt to take a stance against discrimination is inherently discriminatory in and of itself.

Collectively, we can't move forward if we grant a monopoly on "legitimate" discrimination to one particular group of people (the political correctness crowed, for example).

While the Russians may severely dislike homosexuality, to the point of criminalizing it, at least they're honest about it. They don't pretend to be against discrimination, while simultaneously engaging in it, like the political correctness crowed constantly does.

I find honest dislike or disapproval to be much less onerous and disgusting than the veiled, denied-but-omnipresent hatred that the political correctness crowd engages in.