Communicating at the speed of F1
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Loading ...By Howard Solomon
Assistant Editor, Network World Canada
It’s Formula One week in Montreal again, which means IT companies have been urging industry reporters to come to the track and see how they support some of the world’s leading-edge racing cars. AMD (Ferrari), Intel and Dell (BMW), SAP and Vodafone (McLaren), Siemens (Red Bull), Panasonic and EMC (Toyota) are among the companies that have invested products and marketing dollars. AT&T, lead sponsor of the Williams squad, invited us on Thursday to take a peek at the garage and then chat about network and communications technology.
Formula One teams, for those who don’t know, run multi-million dollar machines at races in 17 countries. The cars are wired with hundreds of sensors that spew out gigabytes of data on everything from the temperature of the tires to the shape of the suspension. Much of it has to be then uploaded to the teams’ headquarters – mostly in Europe – for massaging, then fired back to the tracks for last-minute adjustments.
Before the company came along, Williams, which is not backed with bucks from a major car company, was stumbling in the dark ages with satellite and DSL links, taking about 40 minutes to transmit 50Mb files a day.
Since AT&T became a sponsor two years ago, it jumped to a dedicated MPLS connection at race tracks (which is also shared with several other teams) and sliced that down to eight minutes. The telco also provides network-based firewall, Web site and local VoIP services to the team.
These are the services AT&T offers any customer — well, any customer of size. The telco, which has a data centre just north of Toronto, targets only U.S.-based multinationals or companies doing 25 per cent of their business in the U.S.
Alex Burns, the team’s COO, told us how grateful Williams is to be able to compete with teams with bigger budgets in a sport where seconds really count. Joe Weinman, AT&T’s vice-president for strategy and emerging services who conducted the tour, had a chortle recalling that two weeks ago a communications provider he wouldn’t name had an outage during the Monaco race, which if true must have been agony for the teams it was servicing.
What’s coming next? Maybe Williams could use our VideoShare service, mused Weinman, which could let team mechanics use cameras in their smartphones to beam images of a troubled engine to technicians in England for advice.
And the team’s WiFi system could be improved. It goes only to 34Mbps, Burns said. “Yesterday, Joe promised us 100Mbps next year.”
“The price might be higher,” Weinman deadpanned.
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