The Canadian effort behind Olympic network build

OTTAWA — The ease with which athletes, coaches, journalists, officials and volunteers at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, are able to communicate, surf the Internet and watch events beyond their immediate locations will depend largely on a guy working in the west end of Ottawa. Avaya Inc. is the official network supplier of the Games this winter. Avaya is based in Santa Clara, Calif., though its chief architect for the Sochi Games, Dean Frohwerk, works at Avaya’s office in the Ottawa suburb of Kanata. “It’s a soup-to-nuts, hand-to-hand solution we provide for the Olympic committee,” Frohwerk said during an interview at Avaya’s Ottawa office. The network is being built for about 40,000 members of the “Olympic family,” who are expected to have, on average, three devices each that they’ll want to connect to it, Frohwerk said. He said the network will encompass “all sporting venues, support sites, three different villages, two media centres. It’s the first time there’s been full WiFi coverage inside the village coverage within the seating areas as well.” Frohwerk, like many of the Avaya staff who have been working on the Sochi Games network and the technology itself, can trace his roots to back to the once-mighty-but-fallen Nortel Networks Corp., the enterprise-networking division of which was bought by Avaya in 2009. Frohwerk worked at Nortel for 10 years before that acquisition. He said hundreds of Avaya employees throughout its global operations have worked on the network being deployed in Sochi. About 30 of those will be on the ground in Sochi for support during the Games, and about 10, including himself, will be from Canada, Frohwerk added. Jeff McNamee, senior vice-president of strategic initiatives for i-Canada, which promotes the advancement of Canada’s high-tech industry, said the Nortel connection, as well Avaya’s roots in Alcatel-Lucent ADS, provide it with a fair bit of corporate wisdom that can help it through a project such as an Olympic network. “I think that telecom heritage of Lucent — Avaya came out of the Lucent group in the States — and Nortel’s obvious heritage of not just wireless, not just enterprise, but telecom from a network perspective, that makes a big difference,” McNamee said in an interview at The Wire Report’s office. “They have the breadth of knowledge to deliver these sorts of things that a specialist or a niche company might not be able to do.” Avaya also helped build the network for the Vancouver Games in 2010. Frohwerk said a big difference between then and now is the number of devices each athlete and others are expected to bring. “Multiple devices per user; that was never an issue before,” he said. Frohwerk noted that Samsung Electronics Co. recently said it would give every Olympic athlete a free Galaxy Note 3 smartphone, which, while a nice gesture, only adds to his complications. McNamee said that with so many people bringing so many devices, Avaya is facing an unprecedented challenge in Sochi. “Relative to what has happened in the past, it’s just an enormous complexity,” he said. “In the old days, when everything was on wires, you knew what was hooked up. So now it’s a question of trying to be a ubiquitous network for all types of devices and have that up and running and secure for something like the Olympics.” McNamee added that the pressure is on Avaya, with so much worldwide attention on the Olympics for those two weeks in February, and subsequently, a week and a half for the Paralympic Games in March. “It has to be reliable,” he said. David Skillicorn, a computing professor at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont., said taking on a project such as this can potentially give the Avaya brand a major boost, though it does come with a great deal of risk. “The Olympic Games thing is always a kind of knife’s edge between trying to look really good if it works and looking really bad if it doesn’t work,” Skillicorn said in a phone interview. “I think they’re always pushing the limits of what’s possible when they do that.” Frohwerk said Avaya is using “virtual network services” on much of the same equipment for Sochi as was used in the Vancouver Games. This, he said, is allowing the capacity of the network to be expanded largely through the use of software rather than hardware. “The actual products are not a lot different than what we used in Vancouver,” he said. He explained: “When we came around to doing Sochi, I looked at some of the scale issues I had in Vancouver and also applying it to the new technologies that we have, and virtually all disappeared.” Frohwerk said he’s ultimately less worried about how the network will handle 40,000 people with about three devices each this time in Sochi than he was about a similar amount of people with about one device each in Vancouver. Skillicorn said the virtualization of networks helps when dealing with vast amounts and varied types of data traffic, because of the flexibility it allows — the same hardware can be used to handle phone calls one day and streaming video the next, for instance. “So as the load kind of fluctuates between different kinds and maybe different locations through the day, you can respond to that without having to over-provision the hardware,” he said. McNamee also pointed out the virtualization of networks allows flexibility, in addition to an expansion of capacity without a lot of additional equipment. “If you can imagine what it was like when it was a hardware-oriented-only network … if you had to make a change, you had to go and touch it. You had to go and pull that plug or pull that wire or move that over here or change that card out,” he said. “When you talk about the scalability and the fact that they can do this with this virtualization, software-driven network, I don’t think they could possibly deliver it without that sort of capability.” One of the featured abilities of the network Avaya is building — which Frohwerk called “a first” — is the ability to support 36 different Internet-protocol television channels that will be available on about 1,000 dedicated TVs at different Olympic venues. About 18 channels will feature Olympic events while the rest will carry various commercial stations, such as CNN or BBC, Frohwerk said. “So you could turn on the hockey game while you’re at the ski hill and you can see that live broadcast going on,” Frohwerk said. Another feature of Avaya’s network in Sochi is access to what’s called the “Games network,” giving participants and volunteers access to various results, stats and biographical information on athletes that can be pulled up in an instant by people who need it, such as broadcast announcers. Frohwerk, who’s been travelling to Russia monthly to help set up and test the network, said the Olympic site in Sochi was a “greenfield,” meaning it had virtually no legacy network infrastructure in place. Avaya had to start from scratch, in contrast with Vancouver, which was already wired. He said this made things easier in Sochi on some levels, because less effort was needed to adapt Avaya’s technology with older equipment, though it made things more challenging in terms of meeting deadlines. When asked about security concerns in a follow-up email, Frohwerk said that “firewalls and intrusion detection systems are protecting the network as well as Avaya network admission control with ID engines and full separation of services with virtual services networks.” Skillicorn said security should be a concern with regard to the Olympic network. He noted that large events like this can attract people who seek to cause large disruptions, or steal information or money from those in a wealthier-than-average crowd who are linking several personal devices to the network. “That’s the kind of scenario that I think would worry me most in this kind of situation,” he said. “People would come in with all these devices; they would have downloaded some apparently helpful-looking Olympic app, and it turned out to be infected with something and had a very bad purpose behind it. And all of a sudden you have 10,000, 20,000 of these running in a small geographical area doing whatever. That would be very nasty, indeed.” Skillicorn added that, given the corruption that exists in Russia and the questionable activities of its government, he’s leery of whether people using the network will have the degree of privacy they assume. “People that are going to the Olympics and have to keep in touch with their businesses, for example, could feel quite vulnerable — at least I would,” he said. “That’s going to be difficult because it’s not just business people but high-level politicians and world leaders and so on that are going to be there, and they can’t be out of touch.” — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Anja Karadeglija at akarad@thewirereport.ca

The Canadian effort behind Olympic network build

News | 12/13/2013 8:10 pm EST

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