Connecting the Games

With 4 billion TV viewers around the world and 16 million people watching on big screens across the UK, this has been the most connected Game ever. And it’s all been underpinned by one network.

The London 2012 network went live way back in April 2010. And long before that we had to design the communications infrastructure itself, which is basically the size of a large town.

In the lead up to the spectacular Opening Ceremony, there were 42 live test events as part of the London Prepares series, the official London 2012 sports testing programme.

Among the various technical challenges, the London 2012 website had to be engineered to withstand as much as one billion visits and 12 billion page views during the Games.

During the event itself, the network was managed from the London 2012 Technology Operation Centre (TOC) in Canary Wharf where over 90 BT people worked 12-hour shifts, with changeovers timed to avoid busy periods when events are taking place.

It’s just a shame there are no medals handed out for planning and engineering!

London 2012: communications fast facts

It's been compulsive viewing so far, and London 2012 is just as fascinating behind the scenes.

Here are a few facts about BT's communications network during the most connected Games ever:

• the accredited media and Games organisers have made over 250,000 telephone calls on BT's London 2012 network over the last week
• there was a 100 Gbit/s increase in internet traffic during the women's gymnastics when Team GB finished 6th and a similar increase when the men's team won a bronze medal
• when Andy Murray defeated Roger Federer in the men's tennis final there was a 25% increase in internet traffic over BT's national network 
• and there was a 30% increase in iPlayer traffic over BT's network when Usain Bolt retained his 100 metre title. At 9.63 seconds from start to finish, it's a moment when you really don't want buffering!

Service performance stats at your fingertips

We've just launched the first Openreach Service Pack, which pulls together all of the key performance indicators related to service across our portfolio.

We’re going to update the details every month and the first pack will focus on our performance up to the end of June 2012.

By having all of this information available in one place, we hope the pack will help make it easier for our customers to see how we’re doing in terms of provision and repair.

The pack will cover performance reporting for everything from Copper and Ethernet products to Infrastructure (including Plan and Build). We’ll also analyse the number of service escalations and associated performance.

You can get more information about the new Openreach Service Pack here.

North Yorkshire wins fibre broadband race

England’s largest rural county will be the first to deploy BDUK funds so that an incredible 90 per cent of homes and businesses in the area – some 365,000 premises – will have access to fibre broadband speeds of up to 80Mbit/s by the end of 2014.

The project is kicking off right away after the council signed a contract that will take the total amount invested in North Yorkshire fibre broadband to around £70 million.

Ultra-fast broadband speeds of up to 330Mbit/s will also be deployed in certain areas and made available ‘on demand’ throughout the entire fibre footprint. Compare that to a current average of 6.6Mbit/s across the county!

It’s great news for everyone involved and follows on from similar plans announced for Wales and Lancashire.

Engineer turns lifesaver

Frank Kearney went above and beyond the call of duty recently when he rushed to the aid of an elderly woman in Bellshill, Scotland.

Our engineers get up to a lot of stuff when they’re out and about on the job. Between them they climb the equivalent of Mount Everest every day, maintaining and repairing the country’s communications network. But one, Frank Kearney, went above and beyond the call of duty recently when he spotted an elderly woman slumped in a bus shelter as he drove through Bellshill in Scotland.

Frank immediately dived out of his van and ran to help. The woman, in her 80s, wasn’t breathing so Frank carried out CPR to get her breathing again and then kept her comfortable until an ambulance arrived.

Having been a medic with the 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland, Frank described his heroics as “all in a day’s work”. He then got back in his van and carried on to his next appointment!

That’s the kind of guy you want sorting out your broadband connection…

Tales of the expected

I had to rewind an episode of supernatural thriller Bedlam recently when a warning, scrawled on the wall, was revealed by an Openreach van pulling away. It stole the show...

I didn’t expect to see it, but I suppose if you want to set your drama in the real world, there has to be an Openreach van – there are plenty of them around!

But the reality is that many people still don’t know who we are and what we do. And if engineers are refused entry because the person at home doesn’t expect an Openreach engineer to visit, it’s frustrating for everyone involved.

To help people understand our role – and hammer home the part CPs play in getting that message out to their customers, we’ve just refreshed our Expect Openreach site. Take a look and find out more about what we can and can’t do...

Superfast just got faster

The communications industry has been using the term “superfast fibre broadband” for quite a while now. But with our latest fibre to the premises (FTTP) products hitting top download speeds of 330MBit/s it’s clearly gone beyond superfast – we’re now talking about ultra-fast fibre broadband!

Our new ultra-fast fibre products will be available in 15 exchange areas where the FTTP infrastructure has been deployed. We’re also piloting FTTP on demand in eight fibre to the cabinet (FTTC) areas and aim to make this widely available from next spring (2013).

Our full set of fibre products, with download speeds ranging from 40Mbit/s to 330Mbit/s, is now available commercially. That means communications providers can start tailoring broadband packages to suit small and medium businesses as well as meeting the demands of increasingly bandwidth-hungry homes.

The most frightening thing is, we’re not stopping at 330Mbit/s. There are already 1Gbit/s tests underway in the labs, going beyond both super and ultra-fast. Answers on a postcard for what we call that one!