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South Africa World Cup Soccer Stadiums

The FIFA World CupTM is the premier international association football world championship held every four years involving the top 21 teams in competition for the coveted World Cup Trophy at venues within the host country over a period of about a month.  In 2010 South Africa hosted the Soccer World Cup championship for the first time in their history.  The matches were played in ten stadiums in nine host cities around the country.  These events are the most watched sporting event viewed by people around the world.

The FieldServer Technologies Model FS-B4010 was installed in every stadium used for the Soccer World Cup events.  These gateways were installed and configured by nSoft, the FieldServer representative in South Africa.  The customer is a large telecommunications operator in South Africa who set up a special communications room in every stadium.  The communications rooms used the existing SNMP monitoring system by NetBotz.  This system provides CCTV monitoring in the room and SNMP messages to the head office.  The purpose of the FieldServers were to convert the different Modbus devices and the Fire Panel data to SNMP to allow the NetBotz system to relay all the information to the head office.

In preparation for the high visibility and increased needs due to the World Cup, the communications rooms were upgraded and improved to handle the expected increase in communications including voice calls, SMS/MMS, as well as internet access.  In order to make sure that the stadiums had high communications availability, it was important to monitor the different aspects of these rooms.  Devices that needed to be interoperable included:

• Schneider Power meters PM800 (Modbus)
• Aritech FP2000 Fire Alarm Panels (Aritech protocol)
• Diesel generators for power backup (Modbus)
• Carrier chillers (Modbus)

According to nSoft president Bennie de Wet, the end user chose FieldServer, “because of the FieldServer reputation for reliability in critical applications.  Also, FieldServer’s library of drivers included not only Modbus, but also the Fire Panel driver as well,”  Mr. de Wet goes on to say, “the project manager was particularly pleased that the single gateway could handle all of their conversion needs,”

In addition to these installations by nSoft, GE Security in South Africa also utilized FieldServer gateways to interface EST3 Fire Panels to BACnet front end systems in many of the stadiums. 

FIFA World Cup is trademarked by FIFA