Olympic Tickets – Reboot to Nov 5

Well it appears the Olympic Ticketing Phase 2 debacle is complete. This is one case where China Daily doesn’t (or can’t) plaster over the ugly details:

An official from the BOCOG Ticketing Center said Tuesday night that the Games organizers had decided to temporarily halt domestic ticket sales to improve the technical plan and will announce new ticketing information on November 5.

“Because of the overwhelming volume of page visits, the technical system was unable to perform the tasks well enough, and many applicants were unable to successfully submit their applications,” the official said, adding: “We sincerely apologize to the public.”

The first-come-first-serve scheme had 1.85 million tickets on sale through the booking website, a hotline and designated branches of Bank of China.

But demand was much higher than organizers anticipated: According to the Beijing Olympic Ticketing Center, the official ticketing website (www.tickets.beijing2008.cn) saw 8 million hits in the first hour starting 9 am, while the ticketing hotline received 3.8 million calls.

Only some 9,000 tickets were sold in two hours; and the ticketing center confirmed that successful orders will be valid.

Some other interesting stats and reading:

Another day, another ticketing server crash. Following the debacle last week with hacked servers selling Colorado Rockies World Series tickets, the servers offering tickets to the Beijing Olympics crash earlier today, the first day tickets became available. — TicketNews.com [link]

“Can’t get on the Web site to buy tix,” she wrote. “And I didn’t bring my passport today to go to the bank.” Without her passport as ID, she couldn’t buy the tickets in person at Bank of China. Andrew Lih, a blogger in Beijing, preserved a picture of the Beijing 2008 error screen for posterity.” — BusinessWeek [link]

More than 200,000 Internet ticket applications were submitted each minute during the first hour of sales, jamming the site, the Beijing Organising Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) said in a statement. The committee’s website received eight million hits in the first hour alone, while its phone bank was swamped by more than two million calls, the statement said. “The website and phone lines are jammed. Even I can’t get through by phone to the ticketing centre,” Wang Yue, a BOCOG spokeswoman, told AFP. — AFP [link]

The ticket Web site was viewed 8 million times in the first hour after it opened at 9 a.m. Beijing time and a ticketing telephone line received 2 million calls, according to a statement on the official Beijing Olympics Web site. — Bloomberg [link]

This is likely the most demanding OLTP application in China’s history. Trying to transact 1.85 million items first-come first-served across three different portals (Web, phone and physical POS), requiring the use of a backend payment system is demanding for any organization, much less the China BOCOG that’s doing this as a one-off project. (And without a real electronic clearinghouse for banking in China, there are even fewer experienced outfits domestically that can do this.)

Supposedly TicketMaster and a local partner were responsible for the system, but it seems they made a terrible miscalculation in having everything jacked into the same public Web-based system.

For those living in China, this can’t be a real surprise. Developing Asian countries suffer from the “First world hardware, third world software,” problem.

So you will have gleaming towers, beautiful stadiums and luscious greens that will be done on time for the Olympics. But it will take far more effort to stop public spitting, getting people to queue in a civilized manner and deliver customer service at international standards.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 31st, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under China, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.