Avaya architect pleased with network performance in Sochi

The Canadian who led the efforts of Avaya Inc. to build the communications network for use by athletes, journalists, volunteers and others directly involved with the recent Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, said the project was a success. “We’re pretty proud at how it went, from an Avaya perspective,” Dean Frohwerk, Avaya’s director of technical architects, said in a phone interview. Frohwerk, who works out of Ottawa, led a team of about 50 employees that over the past three years put together a WiFi network, Internet-protocol television system and information database that was used at the Olympics, which ran Feb. 7 to 23. As reported by The Wire Report in December, the network was designed to be used by about 40,000 people who were expected to have an average of three devices each that they could hook up to the network. The final number worked out to about two devices per person, Frohwerk said, not as many as expected though “multiple devices per user, yes, we were seeing that.” Avaya also helped set up the communications network for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010, at which time they were dealing with an average of about one device per user, Frohwerk said. He said the added capacity of traffic seen in Sochi was dealt with not with a buildup of hardware — in fact he said less hardware was used there than in Vancouver — but rather through the use of software to get more out of the existing hardware, a process called network virtualization. “We applied something called virtual services networks on top of the hardware, so instead of having separate Internet peering routers and separate voice core routers that I would’ve done in Vancouver, these were all virtual … running on just the backbone hardware,” he said. “We probably had a third to a quarter of the hardware that we would’ve had in Vancouver for the backbone.” He said there were some challenges, such as the late completion of some of the Olympic venues in Sochi, which left Avaya less time than expected to test its technology. Yet Frohwerk said there were no major outages. He said the success of the network in Sochi gives credibility to Avaya as it tries to convince existing and perspective enterprise customers to employ similar technology for their own networks. “That’s exactly why we do these Olympics, to learn lessons on the biggest stage so we can apply those to our enterprise customers as well,” Frohwerk said. “It’s a nice story to point to someone when they’re thinking about virtualizing their enterprise network.” Frohwerk said the company is focused on competing to design the network for the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea. He said the virtualization for that network, given the current state of technology, could be pushed right to the access points as opposed to the venues as it was in Sochi. As for the Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, he said: “It gets tough from a planning point of view to go Winter to Summer … so we didn’t seriously look at Rio that hard.” Jeff McNamee, senior vice-president of strategic initiatives for i-Canada, which promotes the advancement of Canada’s high-tech industry, said working on an event such as the Olympics is an ideal way for company like Avaya to prove its ability to other potential customers. “I would think it’s a very powerful marketing strategy, especially something as high profile as the Olympics,” McNamee said in a phone interview. He said it could prove as a case study for organizers of other sporting events or even music festivals that are looking have communications infrastructure installed for their gatherings. Frohwerk addressed how secure the Olympic network was from surveillance, saying that as far as he could tell, the network inside the Olympic sites was not breached. He added that he cannot say how secure communications transmitted externally from the Olympic sites would have been, with Russian carriers handling much of that traffic. Frohwerk was in Sochi for almost the whole duration of the Olympics. He said he had a team of about 40 people who were rotated in and out during the Games. Of about 50 people who worked on the Sochi network over the last three years, approximately 15 were from Canada, he said. Frohwerk came to Avaya from Nortel Networks Corp. in 2009 when Avaya bought the enterprise networking division of the Canadian telecom equipment manufacturer, which was in bankruptcy protection at the time. He said almost all Avaya employees involved in the Sochi network are former Nortel workers. — With reporting by Derek Abma at dabma@thewirereport.ca and editing by Peter Henderson phenderson@thewirereport.ca

Avaya architect pleased with network performance in Sochi

News | March 3, 2014

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