AT&T speeds Williams F1 telemetry

Stephen Withers
Friday, 27 March 2009 08:43

IT Industry - Market

The Formula One season starts this weekend. IT and communications companies continue to play a behind-the-scenes role in the sport. One example is AT&T, which is now in its third year of a multi-year title sponsorship agreement with the Williams team.

In addition to financial support, AT&T provides communications services to Williams.

For example, there are around 150 sensors on each car so large amounts of data are collected during each lap. While some analysis can be done at the track, there's much more processing power available - including a 13 teraflop supercomputer - back at the factory, along with a larger number of engineers.

AT&T's involvement means Williams can transfer data to the factory five times faster than before.

That might not sound like a huge improvement but Rod Nelson, chief operations engineer at AT&T Williams explained that the ban on in-season circuit testing means it is more important than ever to get telemetry data back to the factory.

And when there's only two hours between qualifying sessions, it makes a big difference if you can transfer the data in eight minutes rather than 40 as that effectively provides 25 percent more time for analysis and action.

"AT&T helps a lot with technology to speed things up," said driver Nico Rosberg.

Other services supplied by AT&T to Williams include managed firewalls, secure email gateways, and hosting of the team web site which is subject to extreme fluctuations in traffic.