Huawei Helps Beijing Mobile and Beijing Unicom Overcome Large Data Traffic Challenges during World Athletics Championships 2015

[Beijing, China, August 28, 2015] Huawei today announced that it helped Beijing Mobile and Beijing Unicom, two leading operators in China, to overcome the large traffic challenges and provide smooth, consistent network coverage during the World Athletics Championships 2015 opening ceremony.

On August 22, tens of thousands of spectators gathered at the Beijing National Stadium, most commonly known as the “Bird’s Nest”, to enjoy the opening ceremony of the World Athletics Championships. The event marks the second time the venue has held an international sports event of this scale since the 2008 Summer Olympic Games.

As real-time viewing and sharing has become an important part of sports events, the opening ceremony saw tens of thousands of attendees use applications such as WeChat to upload massive amounts of pictures and videos of the games. In total, 453GB of 4G data traffic was generated on that day, with upload traffic twice the volume of download traffic.

Beijing Mobile and Beijing Unicom selected Huawei to build the 4G network for the Bird’s Nest based on its large-scale sports events planning and assurance experience at venues including the Brazil World Cup stadiums, the Korinn Stadium in Iceland, and the Beijing Workers Stadium. Beginning work only two months ago, Huawei accurately predicted the volume of traffic during the event, and set about working to address anticipated data needs by deploying dozens of network sectors that will continue to meet capacity demands over the next five years.

However, a primary challenge for Huawei in network planning for the Bird’s List was controlling coverage and interference with so many sectors deployed. In addition, planning for standard scenarios was also ineffective given the vast scale of the event. As a result, Huawei utilized its High-density Sector Solutions with industry-leading simulation capabilities to accurately predict the interference of the signals between sectors, enabling it to adjust the optimization of each antenna type, location, declination angle and so on, as needed. A key part of Huawei’s network planning process was to perform dozens of tests to find the best balance between interference and capacity.