As the official technology partner for the Tour de France, Dimension Data is changing the spectator experience of the world’s most prestigious cycling race with the IoT. Using IBM’s InfoSphere Streams analytics platform, Dimension Data monitored the real-time geolocational data of almost 200 riders over 21 days.
From Stopwatches to Sensors
Every bicycle in the race was equipped with GPS sensors and a sophisticated relay system that transmitted data to apps, websites and broadcasters, giving fans and media the ability to track a rider’s progress throughout the race. The experience was no longer limited to a manual process that involved radios, stopwatches, and chasing riders on motorcycles to read the numbers on their shirts.
The Tour is an unusually hard place to do this. It covers thousands of kilometers of open road, often through mountains and remote countryside, with riders spread out over long distances. Unlike a stadium sport, there’s no fixed venue full of cameras and timing equipment, so collecting data means putting the sensors on the bikes themselves and getting the signal back from wherever the race happens to be.
Turning Raw Data Into a Story
Dimension Data’s IoT solution provided a “positional fix every second, the latitude and longitude and the speed of every single rider,” IBM Asia Pacific’s Big Data Technical Leader Chris Howard told ReadWrite. “And from that raw data, we then did lots of things to determine their journey so far, how far they’d progressed, the ranking of the riders, the distance and times between all of the riders.”
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That’s the job a stream analytics platform does. Instead of storing data and analyzing it later, it processes each reading as it arrives, so the gaps between riders or the size of a breakaway can be worked out and shown to viewers while the race is still happening. For a sport where the leader can change on a single climb, a few minutes’ delay would make the numbers far less useful.
Analysis at the Edge
In the future, a related IBM technology known as Quarks will provide cycling fans, broadcasters and team strategists deeper insights during the Tour. Quarks is an open source platform that lets developers create IoT applications to analyze data on the edge of their networks.
“Edge” here means analyzing data on or near the device that collects it, such as a sensor on a bike, rather than sending everything back to a central data center first. That cuts the amount of data that has to travel over patchy mobile connections, and it lets a device react to what it measures straight away.
Howard believes that sensitive information such as “power output data, cycling cadence, pedalling cadence, respiration, [and] heart rate” could be gathered and used in a competitive nature.
To read more about how IoT is disrupting the Tour de France, please click here.
What Happened Next
Quarks didn’t keep its name for long. The project had entered incubation at the Apache Software Foundation in February 2016 under the name Quarks, and a new name, Apache Edgent, was approved in July 2016. Edgent released version 1.0.0 that December, but the project never graduated from the incubator. It was retired on November 20, 2019.
Dimension Data’s own name also faded. Japan’s NTT had bought the company in 2010, and on July 1, 2019, it merged Dimension Data with NTT Communications and NTT Security to form NTT Ltd, a US$11-billion business headquartered in London. Only the Middle East and Africa operation kept the Dimension Data brand, and that went too: it became NTT Data on April 1, 2024, when NTT merged NTT Ltd and NTT Data into a single global IT services company.
The idea Howard described in 2016 has become normal in sports broadcasting. Live speed, position and gap data now appear on screen in many sports, and fans expect apps to show them where every competitor is. What started as a showcase on one bike race helped show that live sensor data could make a long, spread-out event easier to follow.
What It Means for IoT Startups
The Tour de France project is a good example of where IoT works best: a clear problem, in this case following 200 riders across a country, that’s hard to solve any other way. The sensors and analytics were only valuable because they produced something fans and broadcasters could use straight away.
It also shows how quickly the names and platforms change. Quarks became Edgent and then retired, and Dimension Data became part of NTT. For founders building on someone else’s platform, it’s worth planning for the possibility that the tools you rely on today will be renamed, merged or wound down.
Frequently Asked Questions
How did Dimension Data track riders in the Tour de France?
Every bicycle carried GPS sensors and a relay system that sent data to apps, websites and broadcasters. Using IBM's InfoSphere Streams platform, Dimension Data monitored the real-time location of almost 200 riders over 21 days.
What data did the system produce?
Chris Howard of IBM said it gave a positional fix every second, with the latitude, longitude and speed of every rider. From that, it worked out each rider's progress, the rankings, and the distances and times between riders.
What was IBM's Quarks?
Quarks was an open source platform for building IoT applications that analyze data at the edge of a network. It was renamed Apache Edgent in 2016 and the project was retired in November 2019.
What happened to Dimension Data?
On July 1, 2019, NTT merged Dimension Data with NTT Communications and NTT Security to form NTT Ltd. The Middle East and Africa business kept the Dimension Data name until it became NTT Data on April 1, 2024.
What other rider data did Chris Howard think could be collected?
Chris Howard suggested that sensitive information such as power output, cadence, respiration and heart rate could be gathered and used competitively.