Virtual Spectator says it's plainer sailing

By PETER GRIFFIN

After teething troubles that have left many subscribers without online coverage of Louis Vuitton race action, Virtual Spectator says its 3-D graphics service is growing more reliable by the day.

A second major outage hit the company's online racing service last Thursday, dismaying users.

Chief executive Greg Young again attributed it to problems with US-based servers, in this case a denial of service-type deluge of data.

Long calls to the US late into the night had been made to solve the problem and ensure it did not happen again.

Young said the service was becoming more robust and staff were working "flat out" to help subscribers who were emailing news of their own technical problems.

"There's no manual that tells you how to do this, we're the only company in the world doing it," said Young, who pointed out that a number of variables outside Virtual Spectator's control had affected users.

Developing the client software that users download, so that it works across all operating systems and computer configurations, had been difficult.

Virtual Spectator also had to contend with failures in GPS hardware, missing data packets and the unpredictable nature of the worldwide web.

Dozens of frustrated users posted messages to the Virtual Spectator online forum following race coverage outages, some wanting to know if they could get their money back.

Asked if Virtual Spectator would provide refunds, Young said he could not answer that question.

"I think everybody wants the software, wants the experience, so the preference is to get them working."

Virtual Spectator dispelled rumours that its debut on day one of the Louis Vuitton Cup was spoiled by outages in Telecom's CDMA high-speed data network, which is being used to send data from the racing yachts back to land.

Telecom's technical operations manager for the regatta, John Warne, said the network had gone down for a period during the first afternoon of races but that was not behind Virtual Spectator's problems.

Telecom set up two networks. One provides coverage for boaties watching the race from the water and wanting to connect wirelessly to the internet, and the other returns race data to shore.

Warne said a box, known among the sailors as the Orange Roughy, was located at the back of each yacht. Its contents include a Trimble GPS (global positioning system) unit for calculating latitude and longitude positions, an electronic compass and a wireless CDMA1x modem.

The data was sent to an inner-city telephone exchange, then processed by TV graphics company Animation Research and fed to the TVOne studio, the Louis Vuitton media centre and Virtual Spectator.

Telecom had paid for construction of the CDMA network, which had so far delivered more than 95 per cent reliability, said Warne.

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