Sochi's Broadband Overkill

London’s successful 2012 Olympics fell short in one event: broadband coverage. The city’s shift to top-end 4G wasn’t done in time for the summer games, and visitors had to settle for slower 3G service. That made it tough to stream video, send and receive large files, or just plain use smartphones. For this year’s Winter Olympics in Sochi, the Russians didn’t want a repeat performance.

State-controlled Rostelecom and billionaire Alisher Usmanov’s operator MegaFon have spent more than $500 million on building costs and Olympic committee fees to place enormous arrays of towers and equipment in a small corner of the coastal resort city. Moscow-based MegaFon installed more than 900 towers and antennas in the 0.8 square miles where most Olympic competitions are taking place, says Tigran Pogosyan, head of the company’s Sochi project. That’s the highest density of mobile equipment in the world, according to chipmaker Qualcomm, which is advising MegaFon. The bandwidth is enough to handle about 1.2 million users; Sochi’s population is 400,000, and about 1 million tickets have been sold across all the events. Attendees at the main Olympic venues have mobile data speeds about 10 times faster than the average Russian has.