TELEPHONY TRAFFIC:AS MANY as 80,000 mobile phone users in the Olympic Park during the opening ceremony of the Olympics last Friday sent unprecedented quantities of social-media messaging and photographs from a single location.
One network, Vodafone, estimated the equivalent of 400,000 smartphone pictures had been sent, the traffic peaking with the arrival of the British team into the Olympic Stadium.
The company said UK data traffic was up 5 per cent on the previous week. Thirty additional mobile-phone masts have been installed at the park, along with a wifi network that promises to beat most visitors’ home broadband.
However, television coverage of the men’s cycling road race on Saturday was affected when commentators could not get access to split-times, leading them to identify the wrong riders as leaders.
The company providing the data was unable to get the information through on its system because so many spectators were uploading photographs to Facebook and Twitter.
Changes were made for Sunday’s women’s race, with some commentators resorting to stopwatches to ensure they were not caught out again.
However, London 2012 organisers will want to ensure social-media traffic does not cause problems during the marathon and triathlon events still to come.
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