Playing safe at soccer's mainevent

Saturday night in Pusan, South Korea, and Fifa officials cannot contain their delight at the list of items that will make next year's football World Cup unique.

As the minutes tick away to the final draw, Sepp Blatter, Fifa's president, feeds the 5,000 media and sports personnel with the obvious - the first World Cup to be staged in two countries, the first to use more than 20 stadiums and media centres, the first to be held in Asia - and lesser facts - such as a cumulative worldwide audience over the course of the tournament that is likely to top 50bn, compared with 35bn in France three years ago. The rise is due to the qualification of China, and the fact that this is the first World Cup transmitted live on the internet.

Watching from the side are Gerard Gouillou and Albert Hilber, Fifa's joint heads of IT projects and the men charged with making sure everything goes alright on the night.

Mr Gouillou was in charge of Fifa's IT operations in for the previous World Cup in France three years ago, which he admits, was relatively easy compared with the task ahead. "In France, we had one technology and telecoms provider in France Telecom, and in one country. Here, we have many different suppliers across two different countries."

In Japan, NTT is providing telecoms support, while in Korea, Korea Telecom is the main supplier. In addition, Fifa has signed other sponsors to provide other parts of the technology infrastructure.

Toshiba, for example, is providing much of the hardware that will service the estimated 15,000 media personnel, 40,000 behind-the-scenes staff, as well as the Fifa IT centre itself. Avaya, the US telecoms and networking group, is providing the network infrastructure in both countries.

Paul Myer, Avaya's vice president of marketing and communications. says the IT challenge is "to create a robust IT infrastructure, interconnecting 20 stadiums, four media centres and the Fifa control room across two countries." It is a daunting task not made any easier by financial and organisational problems at Fifa resulting in many of the contributing sponsors only signing up for the 2002 event earlier this year.

Mr Gouillou says that normally he would expect to have at least two years preparing for an event of this scale, where instead he has just nine months. "It's an IT project, what do you expect," he shrugs phlegmatically.

One aspect in the IT team's favour has been the frantic building programme undertaken by the Japanese and Korean authorities. Nineteen of the 20 stadiums, as well as the media centres, have been built from scratch. It means that when Avaya's engineers have gone into the field they have not had to tangle with old legacy systems. "It's been a big help to us," says Doug Gardner, the group's World Cup project director.

The choice of Avaya as sponsor and contributor has been crucial to the success, so far, of the IT roll-out. The company has only been in existence for a year, yet this masks many more years of experience as the traditional telecoms arm of US telecoms giant Lucent.

"We hope Fifa chose us because of our vast experience at wiring up big projects," says Mr Gardner. The Avaya network, spread over both countries, will have the capacity for 100,000 users, although Gardner expects the maximum usage not to pass 60 per cent. In addition, there are 10,000 terminal connections, 4,000 voice ports and 5,000 miles of cable.

For Avaya, the event gives the group the opportunity to underline its international credentials. More importantly, it gives a showcase to its strategy of moving away from its traditional PBX business and towards a more diversified company embracing fast-growing areas such as data and networking.

One of the key technologies Avaya will be employing in next year's tournament is VoIP (voice over internet protocol), which will be utilised to improve communications over local area networks (LANs) and wide area networks (WANs). These will be dedicated networks designed to offer the media and other personnel access to different applications.

For example, such a network will make it possible for Fifa to utilise a wireless LAN. One way this may be used is for a pitchside photographer using a digital camera to download to a laptop and beam his pictures to a web site within minutes of them being taken.

Unfortunately, there are other applications that will have to wait. "We want a system that is not leading edge but proven," says Alexander Koch, a director of Fifa Marketing. "We want something we know will work on the day."

Avaya's Mr Myer says the company fully supports Fifa's position, accepting that in the abridged time for the project experimentation with new technology is not altogether viable.

However, that has not stopped the US group from opening talks with the German authorities over the technology requirements for the 2006 World Cup. One area Avaya is keen to exploit its expertise is in the field of data mining. The networks it intends to lay down in Germany will be able to capture a wealth of detail, from the type of data the media most requires to traffic monitoring, which can then be analysed.

Meanwhile, Mr Koch hints at a change in Fifa policy for the 2006 event. For Korea and Japan, the organisation sold all the broadcasting rights to Kirsch Media, the German media group, with the hope that it would then sell on the rights to produce the biggest possible audience.

While this looks likely to happen with the TV rights, a deal for the first internet broadcasting of a World Cup still has to be agreed. And with most internet companies strapped for cash, a deal cannot be guaranteed. Mr Koch says that Fifa may now look to doing its own selling of individual rights for 2006 to ensure every media is catered for.

Back at Pusan, Mr Gouillou at Fifa says he is confident of delivering despite the challenges ahead. "It is all about programme management. Get that right and you will get the IT network you need."