Game, set and match to Wimbledon's wireless network

Net results: The rise and fall of a tennis player's confidence, poise, frustration, anger - all are silently profiled by a small rectangular panel in one corner of the courts at Wimbledon. This is not the scoreboard that shows the flashing loves, 15s, 30s, 40s of the game and set tally, but the smaller board discreetly off to one side that records the speed of the serve.

It can be mesmerising to watch. Last Wednesday, as American Andy Roddick took on Serbia-Montenegro's Janko Tipsarevic in first-round play, the board showed how, when Roddick faulted on a first serve, the second would be more cautious - some 30 or 40 mph slower coming off the racquet.

And it also showed how, after a series of lost points, he would often steel himself, focus, and then slam a serve in at 20 or 30 mph faster than the average of previous serves. He'd really hammer them in, too, when clearly angry (perhaps with himself, perhaps with the call of an umpire). The speeds are hair-raising - imagine being on the receiving end of a 130mph yellow globe.

IBM, which runs the technology behind the scenes at Wimbledon as well as other tournaments in the tennis Grand Slam, provides the board (which incidentally, has the IBM name on it, one of the only places you'll see a corporate name advertised in Wimbledon's grounds).

The board - which was a big deal when launched and has remained a firm favourite with spectators - is about the only visible evidence of the mass of high tech that lies behind the running of such a mainstream sports event as this these days.

What the Wimbledon attendee sees is the players, the spectators, the neatly manicured courts, the picture-perfect hanging baskets and beds of purple petunias and hydrangeas, all picking up the All-England Lawn and Tennis Club's green and purple colours.

But some 150 people are on the grounds each day, maintaining a rake of technology that is used by everyone from ball boys and girls to the people updating the Wimbledon website (last year, it had 200 million page views and 4.7 million users over the tournament) to the people, all pro players, feeding the match information in real time into a huge database of match statistics.

Following a trial last year, the tournament is making major use of a Vocera voice paging system that allows ball boys and girls, referees, umpires, hospitality and technical staff to communicate. They all wear a two-ounce, mobile-phone-sized "badge" device around their necks or clipped to a pocket that can auto respond to various voice commands and locate other wearers of the devices or ring them.

The Vocera system operates over a comprehensive wireless network that was a trial feature at Wimbledon only a couple of years ago, but is now an integral part of the tournament.

It was introduced initially for media use, to enable reporters and photographers to quickly file copy and send photos back to their publications, says IBM.

Now it connects referees and escort teams - and journalists - to real-time match information on handheld devices so that they know what is happening elsewhere on the grounds, when a player needs to be notified of their next match, or an umpire needs to be summoned.

The most interesting bit, though, is the network of people both at the courts and in backrooms of buildings on the grounds who are taking in all the match information (with a backup person always at the ready) and getting it posted instantly to officials, journalists, TV crews, scoreboards and, of course, the Wimbledon website (where for the first time, there's also internet TV - Wimbledon Live - on a pay-per-view basis that can also be streamed to mobiles).

The data entry method is a modified keypad where the keys identify aspects of play - for example, one of the tennis pros employed to enter game data will hit a key labelled "forced", a key for "backhand" and a key for "drive" to indicate a forced backhand drive.

On the main courts, a team of two watches the match and enters data, but they in turn are linked by headphones to a back-up person sitting in a nearby building, watching the game on a screen and also entering data. IBM uses tennis pros for this work because, as an official says, it is easier to teach a tennis pro to use the technology than to teach a technologist the intricacies of tennis.

If it all fails, says Bill Jinks, the IBM staffer who runs the broadcast centre at Wimbledon, they have old-fashioned tick sheets to enter match data. Other aspects remain endearingly low-tech, however: the data enterers note the names of each player in a match on a yellow post-it stuck to the appropriate section of the keypad.

The data churned out here goes to the website, the referee, the broadcast crews in the media centre (after some are prepared as onscreen graphics for producers to use as they wish), and after the match, is complied into a match analysis for every player, which is waiting in their locker along with a match DVD by the time they return from the court. An analysis of Andre Agassi's first match ran to a dozen pages of detailed data tables and summary - information that helps a player analyse his or her game, and also that of opponents. Jinks says the reports on other players are very popular with rivals.

This huge tech roadshow only happens for the two weeks of the tournament, after which it all scales back down to a small, permanent skeleton tech team who immediately begin preparations for the following year's tournament.

And some of the tech team gets ready for the next big tennis event.

There is a roaming band of technologists who might be at the French Open here, the US Open there, Australia here, Wimbledon there, says Alex Philips, IBM's wireless and intranet team leader at Wimbledon (he, however, stays put in England). Not bad work if you can get it.