London Olympics fibre hub 'template for UK broadband'

The London 2012 Olympic Games is set to turn the capital into a high-speed fibre network hub.

The Olympic Park network and its links to 94 venues across the UK could become the template for a high-speed national network, according to Guy Nicholson, the London Borough of Hackney councillor leading regeneration on the Games' East London site.

Speaking at a Westminster eForum event Stuart Hill, vice president for the London 2012 delivery programme for BT, said the Olympic Park would be served by an "industrial strength fibre infrastructure" with 10,000 access points, linked by Ethernet to locations within the M25.

Hill said BT is contracted to make sure that as much of the infrastructure as possible in the Olympic Park and other UK venues can be used by future housing, schools, sports clubs or other buildings.

For the Games, BT is charged with delivering 4,500km of cabling, 14,000 mobile phones, 16,000 fixed line handsets, and 40 Olympic TV channels.

"We will need to be handling six gigabytes every second, the equivalent of 6,000 novels or the entire content of Wikipedia every five seconds," Hill said.

"We will work with them [London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games] post 2012 to make sure that we are adaptable and if there is anything in the ground we can reuse it later on," he added.

Hill cautioned that the idea of the Games is not to provide cutting edge technology but rather a reliable infrastructure for the Games.

Hackney council's Nicholson said the benefits of the network will reach beyond London.

"The capital investment required to put this future network into place will add as much to Olympic Park as it will to the rest of the live sites across the UK," he said.

"It becomes a model for a new network connecting up the cities and towns of Britian.

"The contribution that this will make to our national economy far outweighs what we are spending now."

Hill said BT will be employing 650 people from across the UK to deliver the London Games telecommunications infrastructure.