Athens Boosts Phone, Internet Lines for Olympic Journalists

By: Matt Moore, AP Business Writer (AP) Amid the roar of the crowd, the silence of the phones can be deafening -- especially to the media.

As thousands of athletes, spectators, journalists and officials descend on the Greek capital ahead of Friday's Olympics opening ceremonies, phone companies are scrambling to ensure that the lines of communication remain open.

"It's been a big undertaking," said Sofia Marinou, a spokesman for Cosmote, the mobile arm of Greek carrier Hellenic Telecommunications, OTE. "We put extra effort into it and we've undertaken a lot of work."

Indeed, since 2000, Greece's former state-owned telecommunications company has installed some 43,000 fixed lines throughout Olympic sites in and around Athens. It also set up 3,000 ISDN connections in 60 different venues to accommodate the more than 21,500 journalists from around the world.

OTE spent about $372 million to sponsor and improve Greece's telecommunications infrastructure and install 750 miles of fiber-optic cables for Olympic facilities, 6,000 high-speed computer connections and more than 5,000 broadband data connections. OTE also helped set up the lines for a secure network being used by police and security forces.

The number of masts for carrying cell phone signals from the city center to nearly everywhere in the world has more than tripled, as companies like Cosmote, Vodafone and TIM, a subsidiary of TIM Italia, positioned themselves for the crush of phone calls expected during the games.

"In the telecommunications industry, it truly is a nightmare scenario," said John Strand, a telecommunications consultant based in Copenhagen, Denmark, who has monitored the buildup of the communications networks in Greece and the capital.

"Greece is used to a lot of people coming to visit in the summer, but you have to look at the impact of the Olympics," Strand said, noting that 2.6 million tickets have been sold for the games, which end Aug. 29.

"During the opening ceremonies and other events, there is going to be a lot of people who want to make calls, he said. "Traffic is going to explode."

So far, there have been some breakdowns and reports of dead air and dropped calls.

And it's not just cell phones. Internet connections have slowed to a crawl, only to speed back up.

Some callers can't get access to the cellular networks operated by Cosmote, Vodafone and TIM. Company spokespeople, reluctant to give their names, said it was because of surges in the number of people making calls.

Outside Carrefour, a superstore that sells everything from milk to bedroom furniture, two shops offering mobile phones did a brisk business selling prepaid phones and phone cards to journalists, spectators and others.

At Germanos, one of the clerks, extolled the virtues of a Nokia 6600 to a pair of men sporting "Argentina" emblazoned on the back of their golf shirts.

"It works fine," the clerk said in a mixture of Spanish and English. "It does, but if you can't make a call, you wait five minutes and it will work fine."

On Wednesday, ADSL service for parts of Athens, including some Olympic venues, and southern Greece, came to a halt for 30 minutes because of a system malfunction. At the end of July, nearly 50,000 telephones at Olympic sites and parts of Athens went dead for more than 10 hours when technicians tried to upgrade the system, an OTE spokeswoman said. A backup network kept about half the telephones working at the affected sites.

Marinou said OTE and Cosmote have contingency plans to increase or boost the cellular network, which has been expanded to include 2G and 3G service for advanced users who want to download video of the events or send photos of the Acropolis to friends back home.

That's a move Strand said would help alleviate overcrowding and, in the end, result in less grumbling.