The 2008 Beijing Olympics were an incredible showcase for Internet technology. The event was 100% IPv6, included embedded IPv6 cameras, building automation systems, taxi monitoring and mobile devices for staff – the largest production IPv6 deployment to date, and an exciting IPv6 IoT experiment as well. Hats of to the Chinese organizers’ IT team, great work. Read more technical details here.

The 2014 Sochi Winter Olypics hosted in Russia, will be the ultimate showcase for embedded IPv6 and 6LoWPAN technology. Finland is known for supplying Russia with building and technology experience, and Sochi will be no exception. Snowpolis, a leading wellbeing, sport and winter technology park (where my office is) – has been elected to coordinate the Finnish effort to bid on Sochi contracts for building the sport and tourism infrastructure needed there. Sochi is currently a village in southern Russia. Almost the entire transportation, tourism and sport infrastructure needs to be built from scratch. I am excited to be working with Snowpolis in this process, on the exciting array of 6LoWPAN applications possible at Sochi. If you have ideas where low-power IPv6 could be applied at the 2014 Olympics, I’d love to hear them!