France's World Cup technology specialists this week implored the public to look beyond the telephone tickets fiasco, and promised the most electronically advanced and comprehensive football contest ever seen.
The Information Technology (IT) budget for the month-long event touches 2.4 billion French francs (£285 million), with the four World Cup technology partners Hewlett-Packard, France Telecom, Sybase and EDS responsible for everything from ticketing to satellite links.
One of the group's first tests has already proved arduous. Millions of callers from around Europe to the World Cup ticket hotline last week were unable to get through, while many French customers could.
The head of France Telecom's World Cup operation, Mr Fabrice Bargeault, said most callers from outside the host nation were "filtered out" by the telephone system to prevent other international connections being affected.
The move not only infuriated football enthusiasts already frozen out of the ticket stakes by the football authorities, but angered the European Commission. It was the Commission that ordered the World Cup organisers to sell its remaining batch of tickets to all EU citizens.
The head of IT for the World Cup, Mr Philippe Verveer, in turn shifted much of the blame for the debacle onto the Commission, saying the order to sell to other Europeans meant his plans had to be changed at the last minute.
He said the World Cup posed a formidable challenge for him and his team. The logistics included an estimated 37 billion accumulated television viewers, 2.5 million live spectators and 12,000 members of the press, all watching 32 teams play 64 matches in 10 stadiums. If the IT end of things were not up to scratch, he said, the whole world would see it; the systems had to be ready and working perfectly from the start.
"And there is no possibility of postponement, unlike most other IT projects," he joked to reporters last week.
As well as the smooth operation of the television broadcasts and satellite systems, the telephones, fax machines, mobile phones, VIP accreditation, media centres and ticketing, France 98 is to be the first World Cup with its own official Internet Website.
"This will be up-to-the-minute, a never-ending stream of information," said Mr Jean LeSain, the former French naval officer that heads up the Hewlett-Packard World Cup project.
He said the organisers expected there to be about 100 million "hits" a day on the Website, compared with a total of 650 million for the Nagano Olympic Games.
Although a hit is not the same as an access - each computer user accessing the site registers a hit for every graphic or text file they use - Mr LeSain said he expected millions of users to go to the site immediately after each match. Hewlett-Packard's Internet servers are installed on a unique, load-balancing system, he said, so that such surges in demand do not crash the machines.
EDS, the official IT Services provider for the contest, also plans to limit access to particularly graphics-rich content on the Internet site an example would be video clips of goals scored at peak times. This should ensure that well-equipped computer users with fast connections to the Internet do not hog the Website at the expense of those with slower connections or older equipment.
The Texas-based company, which integrated the systems at the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and the 1994 World Cup in the US, is also responsible for making the France 98 online shop a part of the Internet site. Computer users will browse the World Cup merchandise on the Internet and place their orders.
All of this machinery and software will process and deliver information from Sybase databases, designed to work with any number of different computers.
Perhaps it will serve to console fans who were this week denied the chance to buy tickets.
