What really broke the BBC's cycling coverage

It doesn’t take a genius though does it James, to stick a major sporting event in 2012, with thousands of spectators owning smartphones standing around waiting for it to come past them, and figure out that maybe, just maybe, the public mobile phone networks are not going to be the thing to reply on for your timing data.

Blaming one well-used app is not really fair, whether it’s twitter or the BBC. The fact is that people waiting for the action are going to be standing around messing with something on their phones regardless.

Maybe they needed ringfenced mobile channels, maybe they needed to find another technology to use, but really, this is a shabby tech fail for OBS and LOCOG.

Cheers, Paul. Being honest, I would consider it significantly less fair to blame a bandwidth-lite app like Twitter than a bandwidth hog like streaming video.

But, of course, I do agree with you; the telemetry should have been carried on the same protected networks as the video, rather than using a domestic mobile phone network.

It’s a well understood phenomena- for the torch relay it was recognised that a ‘rolling bubble of contention’ would accompany the activity and that in areas where there would be a lot of the public a 3G signal could not be relied upon for broadcast critical data. The response of the relay was to utilise alternative channels for carrying critical signals in areas of high contention, but there are options.

In this case the data (timing and location data from GPS) need not have been broadcast critical, or alternative ways of getting the information back could have been found. The former option (tweaking the editorial proposition to avoid reliance upon a flakey element) would seem to be the most obvious option, but as has already been mentioned the editorial around the road race had some issues anyway.

The second option would have been to utilise a non-public bit of spectrum to get info from the bikes to the broadcasters, or alternatively to use other techniques to gather this data. Such techniques do exist- in essence, any where that you have a video stream and a timing signal you can do a sufficiently precise derivation of the location and timings of participants with a bit of computation. The timing info was in the picture all the time, and that data (the picture) is on well protected spectrum and treated very carefully.

It’s worth noting that tens of thousands of cycling fans regularly crowd the mountains of the Alps and Pyrannees – remote areas with minimal mobile phone coverage. And yet France TV and the race organisers, ASO, never have any problem getting some quite complicated telemetry about bike locations from across those mountains. The accuracy is outstanding.

Strangely, rather than OBS outsource the road racing coverage to France TV, they give it to the Dutch to carry out.

I’m pretty sure that there’s a way of reserving bandwidth to get that fairly minimal data back to base. Let’s face it, the bike is pretty much sharing its coordinates and an identifier as to the rider – even less data than a Tweet. I can’t help but note that the Tour de France does have a mobile partner…