Log in
Your Local Ericsson site
  1. 2008 /
  2. January-March 08 /

Get instant Vasaloppet results via IPX

Fans, friends and families of participants in this year’s Vasaloppet, Sweden’s most prestigious annual cross-country ski race, can get the latest news thanks to a combination of Ericsson IPX and IBM’s solution for tracking the skiers’ results.

February 26, 2008

Ericsson IPX (Internet Payment Exchange) together with IBM's results solution, is providing Vasaloppet race updates and results live via SMS. There will also be an MMS service providing short video clips of the participants crossing the finish line.

Jonas Bauer, CEO of Vasaloppet, says: "We hope to attract 48,000 participants this year. With these services we are making this event more accessible and personal by enabling people to get real-time updates on how their friends, family and colleagues are doing on the course."

IPX operates as a global broker between operators and content companies, concentrating on providing connectivity and payment mediation. Niclas Granholm, Sweden's IPX country manager, says the SMS service will provide detailed reports on every skier's progress along the 90km route.

"A lot of people have friends or relatives participating in Vasaloppet," Granholm says. "Our joint offering with IBM means that everybody will have access to the most up-to-date information about an individual's performance at any stage during the race, from the start until they cross the finish line."

IBM has been delivering the technical solution for tracking and presenting the skiers' results since 1967 and SMS services since 2002. However this is the first year that Ericsson and IBM will work together to provide SMS and MMS services for the race using IPX.

Sunimal Ediriweera, Global Telecom Industry at IBM, says that this year race results and video clips via SMS and MMS will be available worldwide. "In previous years, the SMS service was available only in Sweden," he says. "This year we have added rich multimedia and video, and extended the coverage. The Vasaloppet is a popular event and attracted participants from 38 different nations last year. With IPX we can cater for anyone with a compatible device, anywhere in the world."

Ediriweera adds that IBM and Ericsson have a global business collaboration and this solution could be used in other events, and complements the overall global data/multimedia solutions offering.

The MMS service is another new feature for this year's race. By sending a text message with a participant's race number to a specific phone number, anyone can request an MMS with a short video clip of the competitor crossing the finish line.

Anyone interested in finding out checkpoint times for a competitor can send a text message starting with a keyword followed by the participant's race number; they will instantly receive split times from checkpoints along the track. More information on this service can be found on the Vasaloppet website.

Granholm says: "The skiers are clocked using a chip attached to their pants. Pressure plates on the track record signals as they pass by, providing an estimate of the skier's race time as well."

He describes the race start as the greatest technical challenge, with huge numbers of racers being clocked simultaneously as they pass through the starting gate. "We are constantly working on the capacity together with the operators and hope this race will set a new transaction speed record for the Swedish market," he says.

Ericsson IPX is a non-branded service comprising mobile billing and connectivity for content via SMS, MMS, WEB and WAP, through one single interface. IPX payment provides delivery and charging for content providers - to more than two billion mobile subscribers across networks in 24 countries, while Operator Payment & Connection Services (OPCS) deliver complete content provider management to network operators.  With IPX messaging, content providers can deliver to and receive SMS messages from 96 percent of all mobile subscribers worldwide.

Related links