News Archive

Another world record, this time not athletic but in the SMS messaging system,

has been broken. Continuing the trend in 2003, there were overwhelming requests

for the SMS result service for the real,- BERLIN MARATHON, allowing us to

report an SMS result service record (Status: at the finish at 3 p.m.):

There were 27,751 SMSs sent at the BERLIN MARATHON 2001, and 35,714 SMSs

sent at the BERLIN-MARATHON 2002 Never before at a similar event have there

been so many messages sent in such a short time to participants and spectators

around the world.

Like in the past two years, tens of thousands of finishing results were

successfully sent to mobile phones as SMS messages at the real,- BERLIN

MARATHON again this year. Every ordered SMS message was received within only a

few seconds of the participant crossing the half marathon mark and/or finish

line.

The results messages included the race number, the first and last names of

the athlete, the achieved ranking, the net time, both half marathon times, the

average speed, and the kph.

Results with personal statistics were also sent to the participants by

email. A total of 8,648 result emails were sent (8751 in the year 2002).

Both the real-time notification system, as well as the email messaging (both

developed by Prof. Alois Ferscha at the Johannes Kepler Universität Linz)

demonstrated their system stability and reliability under an extremely high

load.

We would like to give our congratulations for the overwhelming success of

the real,-BERLIN MARATHON 2003, both athletically and organizationally, and

hope that we were able to make a small contribution to the success of the

event.

Sincerely from Linz

Alois Ferscha