The Paris 2024 Olympics were an amazing spectacle, as athletes from all over the globe competed at the highest level watched by the entire world.
The opening ceremony alone was watched by three billion viewers globally - but this wasn’t just a win for sports or the medalists, but for digital infrastructure and connectivity, too.
When watching athletes swim and run faster than ever before, we typically think about the dedication and commitment to achieve those feats. We don’t often think how sitting in an armchair or standing on the subway we and millions of others are able to witness this without interruption in real time. What does it take to win a gold medal? A question asked by many. What does it take to broadcast the Olympics to the world? A question asked by not as many but nevertheless an interesting question, and I had the chance to sit down with Fabrice Coquio, SVP, Managing Director at Digital Realty France, to talk about putting on a show like the Olympics.
The Olympics had traffic spikes of up to 1.87 Terabytes per second, the same as 500 hours of ultra-high definition video shared every second. How on earth did you prepare for that?
The datacenters need the capacity for scalability and agility. Particularly in the time and the years and months in advance they have to prepare and install much more robust infrastructure to deal with the peak requirements in terms of connectivity, searches, images, or cyber defence to be ready.
For sure, not all datacenters today or in the future will be able to deal with these kind of events. They need to have a strong infrastructure in terms of redundancy and power capacity. They need to be large and they need to also be able to be part of a hub. Meaning, they have a real community of partners in this case Atos, Alibaba, and Orange. This is where we have a role to play, by gathering various verticals in our community of customers.
North of Paris, where most of the events took place, there is a historic concentration of datacenters. We operate six datacenters in the area and around the Stade de France so very close by. We were lucky that we had the right datacenters in the right location, we didn’t need to build a datacenter for this purpose but we had 1000 people working for four years in the build up to the Olympics.
How do these hubs work?
Finding the right datacenter able to deliver agility in terms of allowing more power capacity creating more cross connections to interconnect with ISPs, carriers, peering points, and CDNs. It’s not only a datacenter for Orange or Atos, you find hundreds of different partners across IT companies and service providers. We’ve got more than two other networks connected in our site and this is the basis where you can deliver scalability and agility.
We provide the infrastructure of the datacenters and nothing else. Which means that it’s the role of Orange to be sure of what they need, they will have asked us to be prepared in advance in terms of bandwidth and servers, and this is why we started years before the event just to prepare the contract, the set up. What is essential is that not only have we prepared in advance but we also have redundancy which is the major factor so that if something fails, we can recover with something else.
Can you tell me more about how a thousand people worked for four years to make this a reality?
The target of Orange was not only to be well prepared but also to test some new technologies and services. The 5G distribution for example, we have to go back 4 years before the 5G network was everywhere in France. So, I think it was not only resource preparation, it was also technology preparation. Practically speaking, in our datacenters, they set up more capacity in terms of network pops, routers, servers, storage equipment and connectivity equipment. They also developed metro networks, connecting the dark fibre between places where events would heled. Some of them being permanent and some others being in the middle of the Eiffel tower for example.
Were there any games that posed more of a challenge?
There was one thing that happened. The swimming competition was supposed to be in a stadium close to the Stade de France but for lack of seats available they had to change the location in the North West of Paris. We had a datacenter close by that was a pure coincidence but Orange had to modify the dark fibre infrastructure and equipment to be able to capture the content in this location which was not prepared for years in advance. Luckily, it was very close to the Paris city centre and already used for concerts for very large events. We just had to reinforce the existing datacenter infrastructure. They did not have to start from zero.
Was anything different at this Olympics?
Maybe one thing. In the few weeks before the opening ceremony, Orange noticed that the level of DDoS attacks and cyber phishing was enormous, and much more than what they had faced at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021. When the opening started and the days subsequent to that there was up to thirty times more attacks compared with the Tokyo Olympics. Because Atos and Orange were monitoring what was going on days and weeks before they needed to reinforce the capacity of the infrastructure by adding additional equipment. This is where we again played a role in terms of agility in terms of not only the space and power but also the people to get that done on time.
What will happen to all the Paris 2024 infrastructure now?
I’m not sure they're going to dismantle anything for one basic reason. The growth of data is rising on a yearly basis increasing by 140%. So, of course events like this have a very specific peak but at the end of the day its in a very constant increasing trend. It’s very costly what Orange have invested in and they’re going to use that super pops for other services in the coming years.
What insights did you get from working with Orange on these games?
There are two or three points. These games have shown that latency is more critical. People can run a 100m race in a few seconds and the winners are separated by milliseond. Plus, the weight of images and videos shared worldwide to more than 5 billion people at a certain moment is just huge. It shows how important for the organisers and for these big players like Atos and Orange to have datacenters in the very geographic proximity of the events. I think it is essential and going to be more and more the case in 4 four years in LA. It will also pose challenges as in the next event there will be surfing in Tahiti in the middle of the pacific.
Do you think digital infrastructure will be a key point when it comes to being awarded the host of the Olympic games in the future?
I’m pretty sure the organizers in the future will need to include datacenter capacity and telecommunications infrastructure before awarding such an event to a country or city.
Lets take the World Cup (in 2030) between Spain, Portugal, and Morocco first. I see no issue with the current infrastructure in Spain to deal with the event but to some extent Portugal might struggle and it might be a real challenge for Morocco for two or three reasons. The capacity of datacenters are very limited. So far, they plan to build two new stadiums, maybe the biggest one in the world close to Casablanca in the middle of nowhere where there is no telecommunications infrastructure.
