Olympic gold medalist Bradley Wiggins

During the summer, the UK’s mobile operator community got to hone its skills on real time network performance management, when ten million visitors descended on the country’s capital for the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

As part of the preparations, Everything Everywhere, Vodafone, 3UK and O2 formed the Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG) to deal with the mobile traffic challenges during the Games and to provide coverage around the main 80,000 seat Olympic Stadium.

Richard Caul, senior manager for core voice platforms support – network and service operations at EE, talked to telecoms.com about the dedicated real time monitoring of every node covering the Olympic venues.

Dedicated network performance teams were constantly optimising the network to ensure quality of service was maintained and improved if performance dipped below any KPI threshold, while every day all operators would review performance together. A team based in Canary Wharf and on the Olympic park was present 24-7 which ensured every fault was quickly analysed and fixed within very demanding SLA’s.

Read the full interview with Richard Caul here.

Richard Caul, EE

This summer’s Olympic Games represented a huge undertaking for UK operators faced with the challenge of delivering mobile coverage to ten million visitors across the Olympic Park and associated venues.

In order to meet the demands, Everything Everywhere, Vodafone, 3UK and O2 formed the Joint Operators Olympic Group (JOOG), created specifically to deal with the mobile traffic challenges during the Games. The group adopted a Fibre Distributed Antenna System (Fibre DAS) supplied by Axell Wireless and installed multiple base stations in a single location – using a configuration known as a “Base Station Hotel” (BTS Hotel) to propagate cellular coverage throughout the entire park.

EE led the project to provide coverage around the main 80,000 seat Olympic Stadium and Telecoms.com caught up with Richard Caul, senior manager for core voice platforms support – network and service operations at EE, to find out how the operators banded together to tackle their own Olympic challenge.

How was it decided that EE would take the lead on this project, and what does taking the lead involve?

A couple years before the games were due to start, all operators agreed that sharing infrastructure and cost was the best way to ensure successful games. It was decided at a joint operators meeting that EE would build the BTS Hotel within the Olympic park and supply and build the infrastructure in the Olympic Stadium. All other operators also took responsibility for other venues and provided BTS macro sites within and off the park.

EE took the lead for operations support; taking responsibility to ensure everything was in place to maintain the network up to and including both the Olympic and Paralympics. This meant chairing all the meetings and ensuring contracts were in place to support all the networks with our chosen third party suppliers. Axell Wireless was one our main suppliers providing the RF over Fibre technology and we worked with them to ensure we had 24-7 monitoring, dedicated teams on park during games time and a contract in place with challenging KPI’s and SLA’s. The Operational Lead had to make sure every network was ready, sites were alarm free and every fault was being addressed and ready to support any escalation during the games.

What were the key challenges in ensuring connectivity for all consumers during the Olympics?

The key challenges were to ensure adequate capacity across all the park venues and within every Olympic venue off park. This was achieved by using Axell Wireless RF over Fibre technology and centrally located operators base station equipment in a purpose built datacentre in the middle of the Olympic Park at the BTS Hotel for the on-park venues. This way all operators could share infrastructure and provide large capacity in concentrated areas such as the Olympic Stadium and Aquatics centre. All operators also ensured dedicated nodes for Olympic venues and extra core capacity to meet the increased demand for voice and data services.

We also provided dedicated staff on park 24-7, who could quickly access and resolve issues as they arose, along with a dedicated team placed within the Olympic Technology Operations Centre (TOC) in Canary Wharf.

Can you talk us through how the UK’s operators teamed up to provide quality of service during the event?

All the operators had dedicated real time monitoring of every node covering the Olympic venues, including Axell Wireless which provided a dedicated monitoring team looking at all the on and off park infrastructure alarms for their equipment, covering venues like the Velodrome, Greenwich Park and Horse Guards Parade.

We also provided dedicated network performance teams who were constantly optimising the network to ensure quality of service was maintained and improved if performance dipped below any KPI threshold. Every day each operator would hold internal calls to review their own performance and then all operators would review performance together. Any recommendations then would be reviewed and agreed before any changes were made on the shared network.

Lastly we placed a dedicated team in Canary Wharf and on the Olympic park 24-7 which ensured every fault was quickly analysed and fixed within very demanding SLA’s. This team controlled all access and every network fault. In this way we ensured any common network issues were quickly identified and promptly resolved.

What kind of devices did you have to connect  and how did you ensure QoS for them?

Most of the devices used across the Olympic Park and Olympic Venues, were smartphones, tablets, data dongles and a few M2M devices were used across the venues for payment services.

All operators provided dedicated nodes and extra capacity to meet the voice and data demand, especially in the transmission backhaul into the respective core networks. We also installed active nodes across the Olympic Park to measure and report real-time data performance. This enabled us to review and optimise where required across the network to meet demand. Operators also created dedicated real-time dashboards that enabled them to monitor data performance and, if needed, to increase capacity and optimise to ensure Quality of Service was maintained for all customers.

Watch the Olympics case study video here.

BT saw its retail broadband traffic hit new heights during the Games

UK telco BT smashed several connectivity records during the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, including record delivery levels of daily video traffic and internet traffic on its UK retail broadband network.

The telco designed and delivered a single, integrated communications network (a first for a Summer Games) spanning 94 locations with a critical Games-time service availability of 99.999 per cent.

By comparison, three suppliers were used in Beijing to deliver a network with a far smaller capacity.

BT reports that years of planning went into ensuring that the company fulfilled its role as official communications services partner of London 2012, with BT staff putting in more than a million man hours of work.

Key stats include: over 450 million visits for the official London 2012 website, hosted by BT – four times as many as the Beijing Games website in 2008; more tweets in one day than during the whole of the Beijing Games; and record levels of internet traffic on BT’s UK retail broadband network, reaching an all-time on Sunday 29th July when Team GB won the first of its 65 medals.

During the Olympic Games, daily video traffic increased on average by 19 per cent compared to normal, with Bradley Wiggins winning gold in the cycling time trial being the peak. A BT fibre-based network also delivered TV coverage of the Games from the majority of venues to the International Broadcast Centre for transmission across the world.

Now that the Olympics are over, BT has already begun to pass on its experience and expertise as part of the technology transfer to the Organising Committee and technology partners involved in the next Olympic Games, due to take place in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.

Olympic gold medalist Bradley Wiggins

UK broadcaster the BBC delivered a staggering 2.8Pb (petabytes) of content in a single day during its coverage of the Olympics, peaking at a rate of 700Gbps as cyclist Bradley Wiggins took gold in the time trial event.

The figures give some indication of the stresses facing delivery networks during major events, with a record-breaking 55 million global browsers to BBC Sport online (cumulative reach) throughout the course of the Games.

The BBC said it also had 9.2 million UK mobile browsers to its Olympics coverage, making up 34 per cent of all daily browsers, with 12 million requests from mobiles for video throughout the Games.

The broadcaster had 1.9 million downloads of its mobile app for iOS and Android smartphones, while 40 per cent of browsers accessing BBC’s Olympics coverage were from a mobile at weekends with 30 per cent during the week. And a total of 23.7 million people viewed the 24 live SD, HD & Freeview streams throughout the Games for at least 15 minutes.

Telecoms.com has been given some insight of the lengths operators have gone to to ensure sufficient capacity and delivery options for the games were in place. We can expect to hear more about the success here in the coming days.

In related news, popular video streaming service Netflix has announced plans to launch in Norway, Denmark, Sweden and Finland before the end of 2012.

Netflix has over 27 million streaming members in the US, Canada, Latin America, the UK and Ireland, and allows streaming of content to PCs, Macs, Smart TVs, game consoles, Blu-ray disc players, smartphones and tablets, making it a prime contributor in any argument about net neutrality.

O2's network outage causes concern ahead of London's Olympic Games

UK operator O2 suffered a network outage Wednesday afternoon that ran into Thursday morning, leaving hundreds of thousands of customers incensed, with many voicing their grievances via Twitter. Although the service has now been restored, the outage does not bode well for how the UK’s networks will cope with the influx of visitors to London expected later this month for the Olympic Games.

According to Steven Hartley, practice leader of Ovum’s telecoms strategy team, this will cause network traffic spikes, and put pressure on the UK’s mobile networks, which already have a poor reputation compared to others in Western Europe.

“While UK mobile operators claim to be prepared, they have not yet given indication of the scale of their plans. Mobile capacity upgrades at key transport and crowd hotspots will undoubtedly take place before the Games. However, if there is a major public transport failure, the spilling over of people from a location where high network traffic has been anticipated to less well-prepared peripheral cells could prove disastrous,” he said.

He added that the national perspective is both a fixed and mobile concern. The BBC, the UK’s state broadcaster, has announced plans to stream live video of 27 different events on its website on the two Saturdays during the Games.

Francesco Radicati, analyst at Informa, believes there is room for improvement in customer experience management

“BT has conceded that it has brought its fixed broadband investments forward by six to 12 months to cope with such demand. However, where that demand appears will not be easy to predict, which makes fixed and mobile preparations difficult to assess. For example, when a British athlete reaches a final, local support will cause a concentration of demand from their hometown, as well as an increase across the nation.”

Hartley added that he hopes that concerns over UK operators’ ability to cope during the Games are unfounded and that they pass without any telecoms incident, and said that connectivity at the Olympic Park can at least be predicted and planned based on a greenfield implementation of the latest technologies and architectures.

“However, the UK as a whole must rely on previous investments to carry it through – and these have been less than optimal in the mobile space,” Hartley concluded.

It is not yet known what caused the wide scale outage for O2, but the situation sounded serious. Telecoms.com did have a meeting booked in with the firm for Thusday afternoon (on another matter), but it was cancelled as the spokespeople were called in to help restore the network.

The games are seen as a major driver for mobile roaming

At the recent Roaming World Congress hosted by IIR an animated panel session highlighted a number of challenges and opportunities imminent in the forthcoming London Olympics. These Olympics have been heralded as a major opportunity for medals to be won and sport to be celebrated but there are also a number of reasons to celebrate the games as a major driver for mobile roaming.

Millions of inbound roamers (forecast at around seven million) will enter the UK market as a result of the games while the countries operators will see their networks having to deal with billions of additional voice minutes and MB of data over the duration of the games and within the relatively small footprint of London and a number of regional centres. This demand is also likely to be ‘bursty’ being tied to particular events (finals) and the respective national sporting obsessions of the Olympic visitors. This issue was highlighted at a recent IIR Roaming Summit held in Barcelona when discussing the last roaming mega event, the World Cup held in South Africa. At key points during this event operator’s experienced dramatic increase in demand related to key matches and specific events within them. Jaques Bonifay CEO of Transatel, went on to state that it would have been better from a roaming perspective if France had won as international calls were expected to have ‘gone through the roof’. This aside there are serious ramifications of mega-events, like the Olympics for roaming service providers and London 2012 is of particular concern as the first mega-event in which smartphones and data will be an integral part.

Operators have taken a proactive stance in preparing for the event with capacity planning and additional cell tower support. However the panellist were quick to point out that when Germany hosted the UEFA European Football Championship (2008) Deutsche Telekom was somewhat over-prepared with an abundance of repeaters and portable cell towers but a decided lack of roaming. This approach has been emulated with London 2012 with temporary cell towers popping up at both staging centres and sporting sites. In respect of the UEFA experience the consensus was that roaming prices were still prohibitively high when the event was held which would have dissuaded use. However, it was felt that this would be less of an issue with London 2012, at least if roamers were from the European Union, due to the price cuts legislated in this region.

The agreements reached on May 10 regarding Roaming III regulation have come at a particularly fortuitous time. The radically reduced roaming rates will provide a strong incentive to experiment with roaming at the London 2012 event with both roaming voice and data service set to benefit.

It was the panellists view that cellular use would be huge over the period of the Olympics, indeed panellist member Duncan Hill of Europa technologies stated they were rolling out additional support for their coverage mapping service to clients and end customers in Olympic hotspots; as Europa’s main customers are operators there is obviously some concern regarding coverage. Duncan went on to share the fact they are also providing wifi mapping adding further credence to this assumption. Paolo Silvi of Keynote SIGOS argued that coverage for roamers during the Olympics was the tip of the iceberg. He argued that without demonstrable quality of service roamers would simply not make use of cellular services claiming that QoS as well as coverage needed to be guaranteed to facilitate such mega-events.

The panellists agreed that capacity planning for the summer months already incorporated expected increases based on vacationing patterns but they were divided as to whether this would be enough to cope with both holidaymakers and the inspected influx of Olympic visitors. Edward Van Kuijk, EVP Sales and Marketing Hub services for Vodafone roaming was relatively downbeat on the potential for roaming during the Olympics. His assertions came on the back of his own analysis of the number of international roamers expected and their likely avoidance of high tariff international roaming charges.

A challenge from an unexpected quarter was highlighted by Jaques Bonifay who stated MVNOs could potential impact the roaming opportunity at London 2012. Bonifay highlighted a particular approach his company was taking in cooperation with the Chinese Olympic delegation in which they are partnering with China Unicom. Transatel will be setting up an MVNO for the duration of the event providing a local calling alternative for the Chinese Olympic delegation and Chinese nationals. The service is being marketed via China Unicom. Fielding questions Jaques agreed that while he sees this approach as a highly attractive one for users visiting international mega-events it does require a pre-existing relationship to be in place between the roamers home network operators and any potential partner MVNO. Without this it is not a cost effective based on the setup costs, COA and relatively short time in which the MVNO can generate revenues.

Whether the Olympics will be a great opportunity for all roaming players bearing in mind preferred partners and steering will be remain in place is debateable.  Whether roaming data use will increase over the Olympics or impact the consumption habits of roaming users is also unknown. What is known is the London 2012 Olympic Games will be an important testing ground for data roaming in a regulated market and an opportunity for data usage profile testing within an international mega-event.

One legend about the origin of the Olympic Games revolves around Zeus. It was said Zeus fought his father, Kronos, for control of the world, and when he won, the Greeks celebrated by holding a sporting event of the grandest proportions. And this week, with the proposed purchase of Cable and Wireless Worldwide (CWW), Vodafone is also looking to inherit the world.

For the £1bn that the operator is splashing out, it stands to obtain CWW’s fibre network, which covers 56 per cent of the UK population and an international cable network that stretches to more than 150 countries.

Vodafone reckons the deal will enable it to fulfil its international growth ambitions as the firm claims that by acquiring CWW, Vodafone’s Global Enterprise (VGE) unit will increase the scope of services it can offer enterprise customers.

It claims that its tie-up with CWW will create a “leading enterprise-focused operator” in the UK that will would capitalise on the growing opportunity in unified comms and offer UK enterprises the opportunity to purchase comprehensive services from a single service provider.

While it would be unfair to characterise the relationship between  BT and Vodafone as one akin to a father and son, the two share a rich history and BT can be perceived as the king of the UK’s telecoms market. BT recorded revenues of £15.6bn in 2011 – more than twice as much as the leading mobile operator – and is the provider to all of the country’s mobile operators’ fibre, for which it is paid vast sums to lease.

After Zeus defeated his father, a temple and immense statue were built in the valley below to honour him – it is one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Informer doubts, however, that Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao will be quite as lucky as that.

Of course, some things have changed drastically over the centuries. In those days, “money” was actually cattle, lambs, goats or pigs – live money that you could actually eat. But just as society moved from using livestock to metal coins and paper notes, it is again evolving to use digital money, and this week was O2UK’s turn to make headlines by announcing a mobile wallet service.

The operator has become the first in the UK market to launch a mobile wallet offering. The service offers price comparison for online shopping, person to person money transfer and allows the user to digitise cards linked to existing bank accounts, or load money onto an O2 stored value account.

It is available as an app for iOS, Android and RIM devices but has not been optimised for the iPad, and is not available for Windows Phone. Mobile and desktop web versions of the service are also on offer.

O2 is establishing partnerships with the UK’s top 120 online retailers (with offers from four available at launch) and will charge those retailers a per transaction fee. P2P money transfer will be free for an initial six-month period but the operator is considering levying a £0.15 transaction fee thereafter.

Latin American operator group América Móvil also launched a mobile money service in Mexico, aimed to serve the nation’s underbanked population. The service, called Transfer, will be launched by a joint venture between the operator and its banking partners: Citibank´s Mexican unit Banamex and local bank Banco Inbursa.

The firms said that their aim is to transform the mobile phone into a payment instrument for carrying out transfers, cash withdrawals and air time purchasing, in real time, 24 hours a day, through SMS messaging. Gemalto´s LinqUs mobile payment platform will underpin Transfer and the firm said it will also be responsible for the service development, support and operation of the service.

Staying with the historical theme, like Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, T-Mobile USA is getting its pound of flesh from AT&T, after the FCC approved the transfer of $1bn worth of radio spectrum as part of the break-up fee owed following AT&T’s failed $39bn takeover bid.

This transfer provides T-Mobile with a large package of AWS mobile spectrum in 128 Cellular Market Areas (CMAs), including 12 of the top 20 markets. AT&T is also obliged to give $3bn cash to its fourth-placed rival after the firms agreed to abandon the merger due strong opposition from regulators and competitors.

T-Mobile USA said it plans to use the spectrum to help it upgrade its network for higher-speed data services and has committed to spend $4bn on network modernisation to improve existing voice and data coverage, and to deploy LTE in 2013.

In India, we’ve seen a fable play out that even Aesop would be proud to tell. The telecoms market mired by corruption, is still paying the consequences of its 2008 2G scandal. The regulator TRAI has set a new reserve price for 2G spectrum for when it will be re-auctioned later this year.

The TRAI has now recommended an auction base price of Rs 36.22bn ($687m) for every MHz of nationwide spectrum in the 1800 MHz band. The reserve price is close to ten times more than the reserve price of the Rs 3.8bn paid in 2008, when the country held its initial spectrum sale, and is also more than prices set for the country’s 3G sale.

The announcement led to shares of leading operators falling on fears that the big potential payouts will have major consequences on their profitability. The moral? If a deal seems to ggod to be true, it probably is.

Nigeria’s telecoms market would do well to pay heed to such a tale, as it risks finding itself caught up in a similar corruption scandal, according to local reports.

The Nigerian Senate has opposed the Federal Government’s plans to liquidate Nigerian Telecommunications Limited (Nitel) and Mobile Telecommunications Limited (Mtel).

Director-general of the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Bolanle Onagoruwa, argued that Nitel/Mtel owes N351bn ($2.2bn) in debt, adding that the organisation has been dormant for over three years and its market share is almost zero.

However, Senator Gbenga Obadara, chairman of the Senate Committee on Privatisation, claimed that government officials have only made public the liabilities of Nitel and Mtel, while not disclosing how much the organisation is worth or the amount of debtors it has. He has accused the government of deliberately undervaluing Nitel and Mtel in order to sell them at discounted prices to personal associates.

Elsewhere, international operator VimpelCom is to exit the Vietnamese mobile market, selling its 49 per cent share of fifth placed mobile operator Gtel Mobile for $45m. VimpelCom, which is headquartered in The Netherlands, said the stake would be bought by Gtel Transmit and Infrastructure, “a related party” of Vimpelcom’s local partner, Gtel.

Meanwhile, Swedish operator group TeliaSonera has said it will begin charging for VoIP services by the end of May. The firm said that changes in customer behaviour and increasing pressure on voice revenues have led to the decision.

Lars Nyberg, president and CEO said that the firm needs to develop its business models and how it charges for services going forward, and there must be a stronger correlation between usage and pricing of data. The policy will be introduced in Spain within a month and in Sweden for new subscriptions during the summer, Nyberg added.

Back to Greek mythology, and King Midas is popularly remembered for his ability to turn everything he touched into gold. He appears to have shared an affinity with Apple, which once again, rather predictably, announced strong results for its quarterly results. Interestingly though, it appears that it has come at the expense of operators’ bottom lines.

Apple’s momentum has not been suppressed and it has once again posted sharp year-on-year increases in revenue and profit in its latest quarterly earnings. The firm’s revenue grew by almost 60 per cent year-on-year, from $24.7bn in 2Q11 to $39.2 in 2Q12. In addition, net profit almost doubled, rising to $11.6bn from the $6bn recorded in the same quarter a year ago.

Analysts said that Apple owes a great deal of its success to the substantial markups that it attaches to its products. David McQueen, principal analyst at Informa Telecoms & Media, told Telecoms.com of operator frustrations at the huge markups they have to pay on iPhone devices. “It costs Apple about $200 to make a single iPhone, but they’re selling to operators at around $600 to $700,” he said.

According to Aristotle, legend held that King Midas died of hunger as a result of his “vain prayer” for the gold touch. Apple’s reign, however, shows no signs of ending anytime soon.

Other firms that posted quarterly results included Ericsson, AT&T, Sprint and Etisalat.

Ericsson’s first quarter sales dropped four per cent to total SEK51bn ($7.55bn). The firm blamed an expected major decline in CDMA sales as well as lower operator network spending in regions with macro-economic or political uncertainty.

The vendor’s net profit, however, doubled to SEK8.8bn due in part to the one-off gain from selling its 50 per cent stake in handset joint venture Sony-Ericsson to Sony.

AT&T saw its consolidated Q1 revenues rise 1.8 per cent to $31.8bn.Operating expenses rose year-on-year to $25.7bn for the quarter, up from the $25.4bn sent in 1Q11 but operating income margin increased to 19.2 per cent from 18.6 per cent. Rival Sprint didn’t perform quite so well, reporting a net loss of $863m, almost double the net loss of $439m it recorded in 1Q11.

UAE-based Etisalat saw its first-quarter revenues increase by two per cent year-on-year to reach AED8.204bn ($2.23bn). Net profit declined by 0.5 per cent, however, to AED1.809bn. The rise in sales was due to an increase in revenue from international operations, which more than offset the decline in revenues from domestic operations.

Chip vendor ST-Ericsson was so disappointed by its quarterly performance, it seems to have chosen the drastic measure of axing a quarter if its workforce, and announcing it will and take a new strategic direction after posting a major drop in revenue and recording a deeper loss in the first quarter of 2012.

The joint venture between STMicroelectronics and Ericsson generated just $290m in net sales in 1Q12, 35 per cent less than the $444m it posted in the same quarter last year. The firm’s net loss for the quarter stood at $312m, which is 75 per cent higher than the loss it made in 1Q11, which totalled $178m.

The firm has now announced new directives to guide its future, which include slashing 1,700 jobs, transferring application processor activities to STMicroelectronics and taking additional measures to accelerate time-to-market.

Nokia has officially been dethroned as the world’s largest handset vendor, after Samsung posted  figures showing that it shipped 93 million devices in the first quarter of 2012, compared to Nokia’s 83 million. It’s the end of an era and can only get tougher at the top.

Finally, web giant Google has launched its long anticipated consumer cloud storage product, Google Drive. Building on its existing offerings, the service lets users create, share, collaborate on and save files in the cloud.

Cloud office software suite Google Docs is built into Google Drive, allowing users to work with others in real time on documents, spreadsheets and presentations. Users can use their Mac or PC to access their cloud storage and can also download the Drive app to their Android phone or tablet. Google said that it is also working on a Drive app for iOS devices.

And that about wraps it up for the week – take care.

The Informer

London will host 2012's Olympics

UK regulator Ofcom has outlined plans to temporarily use spectrum from the public sector to cope with increased demand for airwaves during the London 2012 Olympics.

The authority said that it will borrow spectrum on a short-term basis from the Ministry of Defence and other public sector bodies, make unused frequencies available, such as the spectrum that will shortly be auctioned by Ofcom, but is currently not being used, and will use spectrum made available by the country’s digital television switchover, as well as spectrum that is available without the need for a licence.

The body anticipates an increase in demand for bandwidth, caused by increased use of wireless cameras to achieve more dramatic and close-up action shots, more wireless microphones to add flexibility in capturing the sounds of the Games, wireless location, timing and scoring technology to give more detailed and immediate information about the event as it happens and wireless communications used by team members, sports officials, organisers and support staff.

In addition, sports commentaries will be distributed wirelessly to the venue audience for the benefit of hearing and visually impaired spectators and the use of wireless communications by security and emergency staff will be use to keep everyone at the event safe.

The decision to borrow spectrum from public bodies and use temporarily available airwaves was arrived at because spectrum within London is already being used at full capacity for many applications that will be used at the London 2012 Games, Ofcom said.

“In preparation for the increased demand for spectrum during the Games, Ofcom has been running a series of test events during 2011 and 2012. These have taken place at high profile events such as the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton at Westminster Abbey, the Formula 1 Grand Prix at Silverstone and the Sail for Gold event at Weymouth,” the body said in a statement. Ofcom will also be responsible for managing the airwaves during the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, which will take place in June this year.

Ofcom has also built a state-of-the-art spectrum assignment system that will manage access to spectrum, keeping it free for those who need it and free from interference, in order to ensure spectrum is efficiently used, carefully allocated and to ensure that interference is minimised. The regulator will also be deploying an especially large team of radio engineers to track down and deal with any cases of interference that do occur.

“The UK’s airwaves are already among the most intensively used in the world. The London 2012 Games will significantly increase demand,” said Ofcom’s chief operating officer, Jill Ainscough.

“Ready and prepared for this challenge, Ofcom recognises that there is no room for complacency. We are working behind the scenes to make this capacity available, to ensure that this demand is met.”