[Pic: Memeburn]

Olympic fans wanting to share every race, event and lunch over Twitter, were told on Sunday to avoid non-urgent text messages and tweets during events because overloading of data networks was affecting television coverage.

During Saturday’s men’s cycling road race, commentators were unable to tell viewers how far the leaders were ahead of the chasing pack because data could not get through from the GPS satellite navigation system travelling with the cyclists. Obviously, annoyed viewers took their frustrations to Twitter making the situation even worse.

An International Olympic Committee spokesman said the network problem had been caused by the messages sent by the hundreds of thousands of fans who lined the streets to cheer on the British team. He went on to beat around the forest, trying not to offend anyone’s right to tweet saying:

If you want to send something, we are not going to say ‘Don’t, you can’t do it’, and we would certainly never prevent people. It’s just – if it’s not an urgent, urgent one, please kind of take it easy.

Official 2012 Olympic communications services provider BT, Vodafone and O2, owned by Spain’s Telefonica, said they had not seen any network problems.

BT says it has provided four times the network capacity of the 2008 Beijing Games to meet the increased demand, laying enough cable to stretch between London and New York.

When asked about the situation an expert at Ovum Telecoms Strategy said at the time that, while mobile capacity was being upgraded at transport and crowd hotspots, spikes in demand at peripheral sites could prove disastrous. Television coverage is being taken care of by Olympic Broadcasting Services, created by the IOC to ensure uniform coverage at all Games.

Of course, the only real solution is to increase capacity, as no one believes telling people to stop tweeting will stop them. In fact, they will more than likely just tweet about it. The IOC  spokesman conceded that asking people not to send messages at key moments “may not have an awful lot of effect”.

[Source: Huffington Post]