We’re getting very close to the World Games 2022 for Birmingham, Alabama. It’ll be the largest international multi-sport event in the history of our state and the largest in the Southeast since the 1996 Olympics. Broadcast in over 100 countries and globally now through the Olympic Channel. There is absolutely no way that we could do this without our partnership with Uniti.
We’ve had the great fortune of working with Uniti Fiber on building out our network for the World Games. We’ve got venues spread all across Birmingham and ensuring that they were all connected for both broadcast and networking is a challenge, to say the least. But Uniti has made that process seamless. We have over 110 countries attending the World Games this year, a record breaking number. There are 3,600 athletes. These are Olympic class athletes that will be coming here to Birmingham to compete. And something that makes all of this just so special in regards to technology and fiber is the fact that we were tasked with building out this dark fiber network to connect all of our venues together in order to facilitate our broadcast, as well as our networking and internet connectivity for both the public spectators and for our operations teams. And Uniti has allowed us to do that seamlessly.
After looking at all the venues that we’re building to, which were non-venues, we had roundabout 15,000 feet of new infrastructure that needed to be built to get to these venues. Luckily, that was all that was needed because of our existing network in the Birmingham area.
But we’ve had to deal with a few challenges along the way. As far as things that dmarcs have kind of been different than normal. We’re working with broadcast and internet, so we’re having to actually have moving dmarcs sometimes with trailers going to be there for 10 days. So having to deal with those challenges has been part of it, but we’ve gotten it done and we now have the nine locations completed.
The World Games wouldn’t be able to connect to the world without Uniti. This is a huge event that they’re broadcasting to the entire world. And it actually worked out that our network infrastructure is already majority in place. So a lot of those locations were already on net, near-net, and it was a perfect fit. It’s been a great partnership with the World Games with Uniti Fiber. We’re excited for July and can’t wait to watch the games.
Uniti Fiber and their team have been tremendous to work with. We couldn’t be more grateful for the partnership and what they’re going to do to help us communicate the good news of Birmingham to the entire world at World Games 2022
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