AUSTIN, Texas – Mehul Kapadia, managing director of Formula 1 business for Tata Communications, oversees the telecommunications infrastructure that enables fans around the world to share, in real time, his passion for F1 racing.
Kapadia told RCR Wireless News that F1 exists “at the pinnacle of technology and sport” during an interview from the international racing event’s stop at Circuit of the Americas in Austin, Texas, for the United States Grand Prix.
India-based Tata Communications has provided F1 with race site connectivity, content delivery, Web hosting and professional services since 2012.
The massive amount of data — vehicle telemetry, timing, geo-location and video transmission among others — is processed through an impressive track-side data center then into Tata Communication’s global tier-one fiber network and on to 240 countries.
Long before taking the reins of Tata Communication’s intricate technical deployment for F1, Kapadia was a racing fan. He gladly recalled memorable experiences at races in Singapore and Montreal and reminisced about his favorite driver, three-time Brazilian F1 world champion Ayrton Senna, who died in an accident during the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix.
“F1 is all about how to take the experience from the racetrack to the fans,” he explained. “This isn’t a sport you can play. It’s about how you distribute the content globally.”
Tata Communications is able to provide real-time F1 content at a one gigabit speed using its more than 310,000 miles of subsea cable and additional 125,000 miles of terrestrial cable.
The company provides connectivity solutions for the entire 19-race F1 season, which includes stops in Malaysia, Bahrain, Hungary and other exotic locales.
In the lead-up to each race, one of three crews — located in the U.K., U.S. and India — assemble a massive track-side data center; while the Austin race was in full swing, a crew was already on site in Sao Paulo, Brazil, for a Nov. 7 kick-off.
“Race weekend after race weekend, you’re moving from one location to another,” Kapadia said. “It’s like a city comes up. You’ve just got to make it happen. There can be no downtime.
“It completely changes the way you think about your processes,” he added, as the setup has to be “repeated again and again flawlessly. Every weekend you get your performance report.”
It takes just three days to bring the data center online and mere hours to break it down and pack it into shipping containers.
“We have a very robust planning process with Formula 1,” Kapadia said. “You have to be absolutely proactive and completely reactive as well.”
The on-site infrastructure includes an integrated fiber, Wi-Fi and Ethernet network that employs multi-protocol label switching, which uses labels on data packets, rather than the contents, to prioritize, reorder and route information.
Kapadia said the focus is on “reliability and latency. You should never feel capacity constraint. Doing it the right way you can get the right results. Capacity, I feel quite proud about that.”
Tata Communications also provides the Web-hosting for the Formula 1 website, which Kapadia said needs to be “scalable and distributed geographically.”
“The traffic patterns can change drastically,” hitting around 7 million users on race weekends. “It needs to be published to millions of users.
“If we can do it for Formula 1,” Kapadia said of Tata’s telecom services, “we can do it for anyone.”
