The Russian city of Sochi is currently playing host to the Olympic Winter Games and has been dubbed the first ‘truly connected’ Olympics by a Forbes journalist.
It has welcomed over 40,000 athletes, journalists and Olympic staff for the duration of the Games, theregister.co.uk reports.
Not only does the city’s Wi-Fi network have to be sufficient for the number of mobile devices consistently being used throughout the games, it also has to deal with a record amount of internet-enabled sporting devices.
The Wi-Fi network is being used to run the GPS tracking on the bobsleds and cross-country skis, as well as point of view cameras and timing devices for races.
The Games in Sochi is said to have four wireless users for every one wired user of the internet, this is a stark contrast to the last Olympic Winter Games held in Vancouver where there was only one Wi-Fi user to every four wired users.
Writing for forbes.com, Lydia Leavitt, says that the use of twitter at the games has also been popular as it gives the public direct access to the athletes. One tweet from a USA athletes got over 29,000 retweets.
Ms Leavitt said: “Beyond the demand for social communications, timing devices and connected sports equipment, the network will have to support a constant stream of photos, videos and articles, as well as 30 IPTV channels so coaches and the media can watch multiple events simultaneously.”
