2012 Olympic Road Race

they seem to be saying they were relying on the mobile phone network to get gps data from the bikes to the broadcasting centre. Can't quite work out if they're saying that was plan A, or their fall-back after their private radio network was overloaded.

I read it as it was their Plan A and their Plan B consisted of people looking at their watches and guessing at the gaps. I don't think they even had a private radio network.

Either way it looks amateurish:-

If their Plan A was a private radio network then it was amateurish if this got squished by lots of nearby GSM/3G traffic.

If their Plan A was to rely on public 'phone networks to rely GPS information then they're idiots if they don't realise these networks start to fall apart when you have lots of people (i.e. spectators) swamping the masts.

The Olympic TimeTrails won't suffer from the same problems because they don't need live GPS data to calculate splits, only the times at static points on the circuit. Surely they can't fuck that up too?