British businesses are being warned that they could lose their internet connections during the Olympics due to a surge in the number of people going online at key times. The demand could be such that internet companies might be forced to ration access, according to official advice.
The warning, in the Cabinet Office’s official advice, Preparing your Business for the Games, says that the country’s telecoms system may be unable to cope with demand to access the internet in certain areas. Businesses are being encouraged to offer staff flexible working arrangements to try to ease the pressure.
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The Department for Transport (DfT)will launch Operation StepChange, a week-long pilot across Whitehall departments, in which many staff will work from home. Ministers believe the project could result in a “permanent revolution” in which home-working becomes common practice for civil servants, who are expected to use technology such as video conferencing to communicate with colleagues.However, the initiative is not without its setbacks. The DfT conducted Operation Footfall, a pilot, last August, that resulted in participating staff experiencing internet connection problems, according to those familiar with the project.
Millions of teenagers will suffer from social media withdrawal. Oh the humanity!
What a BS
The upgrade of the Internet infrastructure shouldn’t be part of the cost of the Olympics?
One of the purpose of the Olympics is the brand new infrastructure that will be left for the citizens (hey citizens!) to use once the show’s over.
Gee, they spend hundreds of millions of Euros in building stadiums and they don’t invest a fraction of it in the Internet infrastructure?
Now I know why Amazon has it’s European data center in Ireland instead of England.
Scary Reason: They need to put a cap on volume so they can achieve their heightened level of scrutiny off all internet traffic. They have their own processing bandwidth restrictions too.
Who is that knocking down my door….? back in a mo.
Morons. The IOC should look at internet capacity as part of the city choosing process. Of course, the bribes take precedence.
The IOC isn’t interested in internet/broadband capacity because they can’t monetize it.
The Olympics aren’t about the people, except for their capacity to suck on a giant broadcast glass teat.
It’s a distributionproblem TV networks solved a long time ago already. TV networks just pick up some satellite signal and distribute that locally to their users and basically that always works. You see these problems happen with internet with every major event around the globe. The whole world tries to connect to some local streamserver(s) at the same time. The system is not build for that and it simply becomes overloaded. Besides that, internet providers are in the game of making as much money as possible. They use every trick in the book for that. Slowing down connections, paying rediculous amounts of money per MB or whatever they can think of to reduce the amount of traffic on their big pipe. The more data, the more it costs them. And most helpdesks blame it on their users right away when questioned. Once providers start realizing they can win big time by delivering good service instead of constantly screwing their users, things may change. Once every provider around the globe starts offering good streaming services locally with proxy systems or whatever, everyone could have a good connection and the local bandwitdh problems around major event areas may just disappear.
The government should pay for an adequate staff of mental health professionals to stand by for crisis counseling when the internet fails and isolates people from their social media.
The sudden onset of solitary confinement and the traumatic interruption of the free flow of information could result in mass psychosis and severe depression accompanied with anxiety attacks and general panic.
Being disconnected from the world is the worst kind of trauma, and the government needs to carefully consider public safety.
Raise the price and the rationing would be unnecessary.
what a crock! there is plenty of capacity, this is a lie told by the teleco’s so they can justify raising the rates.
I hope a hell of a fuss is raised about this. Then, maybe, BT will upgrade that old Gateway 286 they use for the server.
These are public servants we’re talking about.
They often don’t do much in the office, so sending them home won’t change anything.
Their online profile will hardly change – facebook, gambling & email from 9-5
>Millions of teenagers will suffer from social media withdrawal. Oh the humanity!
On the bright side, so will surprisingly clueless bloggers who sound old.
And won’t working from home just increase the problem as now they will have to connect through their VPN to get into the work system. So now you have the home traffic and the work traffic at the same time.
I’m sure that by “rationing” access, they mean that the royal family, and most other wealthy Brits, will get guaranteed priority access. While everyone else, gets rationed what’s left.
Here’s a thought. Perhaps before deciding to host the Olympic games, they ought to have seen if they can handle the logistics of access, real and virtual. “We want the games here! Oh wait. Our roads and subscribe lines are weak. Ok, we’ll worry about it later.” I believe every major city thinks like this.
The Olympics have replaced what use to be World’s Fair fever. And some of those lost money too. Back in the 19th century, and early 2oth, such fairs and expos helped build (or rebuild) struggling cities. But later they became more of a logistical nightmare, with questionable returns on investment. Today, what city gets to host the Olympics, because they need it to rebuild? If anything, they better be prepared for an economic gut punch, as the cost of playing host!
Here’s an idea. How about if Brit’s royal family gives up some of their private land for the grounds of the games? Bet that won’t happen. So the rest of England has to sacrifice, eh? As usual.
What? You think people are going to travel to Balmoral, Scotland to see synchronized swimming?
This is bullshit. It’s just a way of getting tax payers to stump up cash to pay ISP’s to improve their networks under the bull crap that the Olympics are going to stuff it up.
The fact that most ISP’s are OUTSIDE London seems to escape the report. That at the fact that bandwidth would restrict usage more than capacity could.
If you want to know how much BS it is, it doesn’t mention 3G internet access…. despite this likely being the REAL pinch point.
London was supposed to roll out a huge fiber-optic cable internet installation 5 or 6 years ago. Will that be swamped? If it’s not up to speed there will there be a call for upgrades? What about cell phones?
There is a study commssioned by a clean coal company that states 77% of parties questioned – companies and officials – believe there will be an electrical shortage during the Games.