Qwest's best-laid plans for DNC get last-minute twist

“They do their own inside the venue, so we had to learn a lot quickly from the building owner as to what was there and where it was,” Ward said. “They had enough to handle an AFC championship game, but this is beyond the requirements of that kind of event. We had to do some real quick inventory of our assets in that area, including locating the manholes and the existing conduit.”

The four-week window left no time to bury fiber to Invesco, Ward said, and the company has only four days to work inside the site. “To the extent we had open conduit, we could blow some fiber in,” he said. “But Invesco is still a live venue – the Broncos play there Saturday [Aug. 23], and we get to come in after they leave the field, on Sunday morning. That gives us four days to construct all the inside infrastructure.”

Qwest will have to lay some fiber on the ground and then go to great lengths to protect it from vehicle and foot traffic, Ward said. “We are working carefully with the Invesco folks to provide the security this requires,” he said.

By contrast, plans for wiring the Pepsi Center began 18 months ago, and included what Ward calls “fiber to the parking lot,” since there are five separate tents, including media facilities, now going up in the parking lot.

“We didn’t know the tent configuration for sure until the past couple of months, but we have been planning for that,” Ward said. “We have been boring, we’ve been adding manholes, doing a lot of work outside of the Pepsi Center in anticipation of the need for a very high-bandwidth private network for the DNC and very high bandwidth demands for the media that have their facilities there as well.”

Qwest used that time to plan where its facilities would go and how to best design a network that would be redundant and secure as well as provide adequate bandwidth, Ward said.