Government guarantees 500 Gbps for 2010 World Cup
Speaking at the Link Centre’s ICT Journalist Media Forum, the 2010 Organising Committee’s Zakes Mnisi said that South Africa will spend between R2 billion and R5 billion on ICT infrastructure for the 2010 FIFA Football World Cup.
Mnisi highlighted the fact that the 2006 FIFA Football World Cup, which was hosted in Germany, provided almost 500 Gbps of dedicated bandwidth infrastructure. According to Mnisi the South African government has guaranteed at least this amount to FIFA to host the 2010 World Cup.
A backbone capacity of around 40 Gbps will be required for the event as well as 40 Gbps to each stadium – 20 Gbps for the main line and 20 Gbps for redundancy. Telkom will be responsible for the execution of the access network which will be funded by the Department of Communications, while Telkom will fund the national network needs of the event.
Telkom recently announced that it has signed a $36 million ‘value-in-kind sponsorship’ agreement with FIFA to provide the fixed-line network infrastructure to support the broadcast of the 2010 FIFA World Cup.
Sentech will supply each of the 10 World Cup stadiums, located in 9 different cities, with a satellite backup network. Apart from the satellite backup for each stadium, the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) will have four satellite dishes to serve its personal backup needs. As there are a maximum of four concurrent games played at any time this is considered adequate.
It is expected that the IBC – with an undercover floor space of 25 000 square meters, 500 monitors and 500 telephone lines – will serve the needs of up to 100 broadcast companies from around the world.
There is currently no clarity on who will supply or fund the international network needs of the event.
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