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Euro 2008 transmission outage

Pavel Bykov
Level 5
Level 5

I know this is a bit off topic, but I was trying to find more information on who build the network for this media coverage.

The figures are astronomical as almost 1 billion people were expected to watch the match, and the network team failed miserably, causing a HUGE outage that made most people watching miss the most interesting parts.

I know (from the PACKET days) that ITV has it's media network built using dual-star topology on MPLS, with DMVPN for security, 2851 and branch routers. The TV digital media is transported in MXF format. Since everything is doubled, the good UPS system will complete the picture.

But what happened to UEFA and how could deployment of such criticality and scale could be such a failure? There should be huge penalties, but everyone blames "the storm".

Short info I have gathered

Broadcast center name: IBC

UEFA media technology arm: UMET

The core UMET team consists of 130 professionals from 18 different countries, structured in Content, TV Production, ICT and broadcast Partner Services. It provides multiple synergies dealing with complex projects in converged media for UEFA

What really happened

Storm caused short power outage, but the system failed to switch to backup.

Never ever EVER in history of building mission critical networks I have seen such fundamental error. Power outage is #1 reason for network failure, therefore architecting and TESTING such system is of a great importance.

How their network looks like? Where were testing procedures in place before going live? Were they incompetent engineers or incompetent managers that hired incompetent engineers?

Also, you can contact UEFA Media Technologies S.A.

Igor Masnjak

Marketing & Research Manager

Tel.: +41-22707-2530

E-Mail: igor.masnjak@uefa.ch

Additional info:

http://uk.reuters.com/article/worldFootballNews/idUKL2622337020080626

http://www.prnewswire.co.uk/cgi/news/release?id=228510

2 Replies 2

sirdudesly
Level 2
Level 2

Most of the information that you are looking for related to network design is probably NDA anyway. It was probably an internal build so I guess that's where the blame is laid.

Giuseppe Larosa
Hall of Fame
Hall of Fame

Hello,

you are right and your post is interesting.

However, having built a single network infrastructure for the event instead of letting each single TV company its own network looked like a reasonable choice if all the steps for designing and testing have been made.

Do you mean the Germany-turkey match ?

best regards

Giuseppe

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