London 2012 was based around a number of outdoor water-sports locations, some indoor stadia, but most importantly the Queen Elizabeth II Olympic Park in Stratford, London.
I was responsibility for capacity design, ordering and delivery of Vodafone’s Ericsson equipment to a 1MW Data Centre, called the BTS Hotel, hidden behind the Organising Committee (LOCOG) offices, and the world’s biggest McDonalds!
Put simply it was a very large scale (over 200 sectors carrying 2G and 3G signals from all 4 UK MNOs plus Emergency Services) Neutral Host RF over Fibre Digital DAS.
All the Radio Access Network Equipment was in the 2 floor Data Centre, inputting into the DAS Head End Equipment. This distributed the signals over fibre around the entire park and then Digital Remote Radios transmitted the signals to over 10 million sports fans from antennas hidden in the roof spaces.
The Data Centre (& LOCOG offices, McDonalds and Corporate Hospitality which surrounded them) are long since demolished.
But the ability to deploy RAN baseband/DAS many hundred metres or even miles from where it is needed has been refined and is the stalwart of Indoor Neutral Host Coverage today!
A little more complex to describe today, so I created a complementary Article with a bit more details and links to more current deployments.
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