Venue managers for the BT London 2012 Delivery Programme take us behind the scenes. This time, Ian Furey talks about his involvement with Hyde Park, venue for the triathlon and marathon swim events.
In my last blog post I explained how I came to be part of the team that’s helping to make London 2012 happen. This time I’ll explain what my role in this vast and exciting project is.
As I mentioned before, I’m assigned to Hyde Park, which is considered a ‘Festival’ site, meaning it’s an existing location, but there’s no current ‘venue’ as such.
In essence I take the technical requirements, the venue build designs and the layout of the Park and work with BT network designers to draw up the specification for the Telecoms Equipment Room (TER), housing all the major equipment that connects the venue to the outside world. It’s a purpose-built, secure, mobile comms room that’s diversely connected to the BT core communications infrastructure, via which we’ll deliver all the relevant WAN services.
After overseeing the installation of power, air conditioning, fire suppression, environmental controls etc. I started managing our network engineers through the lengthy process of carefully connecting all the equipment, using single and multicore fibre, via patch panels, to the cisco provided distribution switches. We continually test the circuits to ensure we meet all our quality standards and then war game to make sure the data travels to the correct locations at the correct speeds.
Next I worked with the BT designers to decide the best routes for delivering and terminating fibre to each part of the venue. Fibre can cover great distances which is exactly what you need in an environment as big as the Royal Parks, but we then need to provide local services for network ports e.g. so the functional areas can plug their laptops in, use VoIP handsets to make calls, transfer results over the network etc.
It’s really exciting seeing the venue spring up from open parkland.
Of course, we need to prove that our people, plans, processes, systems and deliverables will meet next year’s goals. So, in my next blog I’ll explain about our series of “test events” and tell you about 2 gold medals for GB!
