Olympian Circles of Broadband

It is particularly hard to find a networking/broadband angle to the Summer Olympics. Something which has not been reported in the media ad nauseam. Well, I did find an interesting little tidbit to share with you all. It is a company called Network Equipment Technologies. NET. Get it? The company makes an access platform, Promina, which is used for broadband delivery and is currently being used to deliver video, data and voice services at Athens. Actually this is not a new company – has been around for 20 years and has been selling gear to pretty much everyone in the business for the longest time. CEO Bert Whyte has built a business with government agencies, civilian authorities, etc. that has sustained the business during the telecom downturn. Who knew that the company supplies networking gear to BART for its train control systems. As a publicly traded company, net.com didn’t sit back on a large cash position and wait it out. Whyte has been the President and Chief Executive Officer of net.com since June 1999 and tried to reposition the company to focus on “broadband” opportunities. Here are some other Broadband and Olympics stories of note:

• ZTE Corp. of China, has helped OTE (The Greek Telecommunications Organisation) deploy an ADSL network covering 16 points in Athens. Using ZTE’s ADSL system, all Olympics facilities in Athens including main venue, international broadcasting center, news center, press village are able to access broadband Internet services throughout the event.
• Olympics are being broadcast online
• Some fun Olympian telecom facts from Associated Press: Since 2000, OTE installed some 43,000 fixed lines throughout Olympic sites in and around Athens, as well as 3,000 ISDN connections in 60 different venues to accommodate the more than 21,500 journalists from around the world. OTE spent about $372 million to sponsor and improve Greece’s telecommunications infrastructure, install 750 miles of fiber optic cables for Olympic facilities, 6,000 high-speed computer connections and more than 5,000 broadband data connections. OTE also helped set up the lines for a secure network being used by police and security forces. (Read the full story here)