Comms kit takes to the Alps for ultramarathons

Alcatel-Lucent provided several pieces of technology to the Ultra-Trail du Mont Blanc (UTMB) organisers. Firstly, the company's videoconferencing equipment was used in the preparation of the event, which involved around 1,300 volunteer workers. The servers handling these communications were based in Brest, France.

The company also supplied the PDAs (pictured) used at each checkpoint to read the RFID tags affixed to the back of participants' name tags. The captured data was then sent to databases hosted in Paris, and subsequently made accessible via a web-browser interface.