RANGERS SIGN HUAWEI TO BRING FANS THE FULL WI FI EXPERIENCE AT IBROX

Glasgow, UK, 4 July 2013: A ground-breaking partnership between Rangers Football Club and Huawei, a leading global information and communications technology (ICT) solutions provider, is set to bring fans into a whole new era of in-depth, WiFi-based engagement with the Club.

In a seven-figure investment, the Club is working with Huawei to provide one of football's first fully converged stadium-wide WiFi deployments.  The market-leading project will ultimately give every fan seated at Ibrox Stadium – as well as those in the approaches, concourse, restaurants and corporate areas – full, instant access to content-rich media and allow them to participate in real-time interactions with the Club.  Starting in August on a stand-by-stand basis, the phased development will allow Rangers to engage with fans and create the best possible matchday experience.  The new set-up will remove connectivity problems in high-density areas and ultimately give 50,000+ supporters access to club competitions, merchandising, Rangers Media, Team Talk discussions, forthcoming events and enhanced fan/club engagement. Stadium WiFi has been under discussion at Rangers for a number of years following fan demand, with supporters wanting to access the full panoply of internet sport while at the ground, but being frustrated by 3G mobile network download speeds.  Now, thanks to this partnership with Huawei, the Club will create a more meaningful relationship with fans as well as enhancing the matchday experience at Ibrox. Rangers Chief Executive Craig Mather commented: "Rangers Football Club is rightly proud of its tremendous fanbase, which has stood by the club through thick and thin, and we aim to provide our supporters with a world-class WiFi service to enhance their matchday experience.  We have teamed up with Huawei, a technology market leader and in doing so we will be setting new standards in terms of interactive communication with our fans.  “Huawei has shown an enormous appetite for, and commitment to, providing an absolutely best in class service.  More and more people are using smart devices as a primary means of communication and we look forward to revolutionising the way in which Rangers fans can engage with the club before, during and after the match.” Victor Zhang, CEO, Huawei UK said: "Huawei is at the forefront of innovation in communications technology and we are very proud to have been chosen to deliver a new channel of communication between Rangers and its supporters.  The high data capacity that WiFi delivers will allow Rangers fans to use social networks to share their experiences, as well as allowing the club to enhance its ‘digital dialogue’ with its supporters.”

Data Centre Migrations - Part 5

Well the DC is up and running and the systems have all been migrated over from the old building. As expected BT let us down with the SIP Trunking portion of the migration so we are having to run the complete corporate telephony system on re-directed numbers down 4 x ISDN lines.

The final parts of the DC Build are taking shape now and Saturday saw the delivery of the first of the generators. This caused a bit of local excitement as it had to be craned over the top of a four storey building and placed in a channel behind the building.

Crane ready to go

Generator on board

It was poetry in motion watching the crane experts place the engine exactly where we wanted it

Annoying Air Traffic control

Still Annoying ATC

Thankfully there was no wind to speak of, indeed it was the best day weather-wise this year and it was brought gently into place

Data Centre Migrations - Part 4

Well, the Data Centre is now up and running having gained practical completion last week. As always there are still some bits and pieces to do , such as finish the CCTV, finish the Access Control, finish the EMS and get the generator installed as and when it arrives, but it is now fit to start installing equipment.

This weekend, past saw the arrival of the first few departments from the old building arrive into their shiny new offices, and we have migrated a few of the core services across such as the Vudyo platform, the email service and one of our operating countries.

BT as always are holding us up although they have delivered the ISDN services and a short-haul data service to allow us to start the migration. As like most BT clients we are struggling with our SIP trunks from BT to allow us to get on with the migration to VOIP, but we keep hitting them anyway.

I am looking forward to the postmortem and lessons learned exercise that I am sure will follow this project.

On a different note, I am off to Kuwait early in June to talk at the first ever Kuwait Data Centre conference so that will be interesting, and I have lined up some additional work with Gamma Telecom, one of the UK's leading independent Telecommunications providers

Migration Projects - Part 3

Well, we are getting there. The Data Centre is on line, critical systems in place and running on test load at the moment. As always there are a number of small annoying things to finish as part of the tidy up but we are on programme, which is good.

Sadly, the telecommunications phase is holding us up. Good old BT can't get circuits in on time as usual and indeed only starting provisioning the first Short Haul circuit yesterday (17th April). I am, hoping fervently that as soon as that is active we can at least start to migrate and test some of the systems.

When BT actually get moving they are OK. When they finally got round to it we got the fibre sub-ducts in quickly. when they finally got round to it we had the fibre blown in quickly. Their main problem seems to be a complete lack of joined-up management, not helped by the onerous rules that OfCom in the UK subject them too.

Ah well at least us falling behind the curve has taken the bad look off the fact that the office build and fit-out project, being managed by others, is well behind time.

This week and next week could be interesting!

Migration Projects - Part 2

Well we are still on track.......just!!!!!!

Surprisingly BT have gone from using the slightest excuse not to deliver, to falling over themselves to help. it is surprising what an annual spend in excess of a million bucks does, although, having said that we still have no comms into the building.

We had a nightmare during a power isolation phase when trying to install a new Automatic Mains Failure panel to both split the incoming supply and control the generator. The panel was too big to fit into the available space so we had to cancel and reconfigure the panel to fit. We will have another attempt on Monday night and hopefully get some power into the secure space.

APC as always have let us down. They were supposed to deliver the UPS devices on Monday of this week but decided that they had a fault in the unit and can't now ship until Wednesday next. This is really strange as they were prepared to deliver them a week early but we asked them to hold them back a week as we weren't ready for them. Methinks that someone with a bigger cheque book has paid APC to give them ours.

Still next week is when it all hopefully comes together. BT on site, Power guys on site, UPS on site and cablers on site.

Onwards and Upwards!!!

Migration Projects

While it is nice to be back in some kind of harness after a few months 'enforced' holiday, I am not sure that a complete Data Centre Migration project was the best piece of work to get myself back into. :)

As usual  the company involved, being controlled from the States have taken on a large and complete Data Centre, Systems and 240 people office move, in a three month timescale, into a building that is still be being built.

Very interesting times though and it has been good relearning MS Project, Resource Management and all the various PRINCE 2 type documentation that goes with it.

I have now been at it for ten days solid and surprisingly it is more On Track than Off Track, although as always in these projects we are at the vagaries of the Telecoms provider, in this case BT, to ensure that timely delivery allows us to stage the testing and migration in advance of the personnel move.

All this whilst the organisation provides its 24/7 business service as usual.

Interesting Times

I have just returned from a visit to the Google Data Centre complex in Hamina, Finland. It is possibly the most secure installation I have ever (tried) to set foot in. There are so many layers of security involved it makes all the Data Centres that I have visited, worked in, or been associated with in the past an open shop.

The Hamina centre is the one that uses seawater cooling, dragged in from the Gulf of Finland to their proprietary cooling system. It is an interesting concept, bearing in mind that the salinity levels in that sea are remarkably low, the water being almost brackish, more than salty. I suggest that they get plenty of 'free cooling' too as the sea was completely frozen in during my trip with night-time temperatures of -28degC.

Still and all it was good to see what you can do with a couple of hundred million dollars.

I return to the UK to head up an interim Migration Team for a finance house but somehow I suspect that the facility will not be quite as 'cool'!