London may have just gotten itself some pretty significant WiFi coverage, but it looks like it's not all sunshine and connectivity inside the Olympic venues. The International Olympic Committee has revealed that mobile hotspots are banned from this year's Olympics. While you are permitted to use a your smartphone or tablet inside the venues, personal or private access points, along with 3G hubs, are not allowed.
TechCrunch reports that the news follows hot on the heels of the announcement that Londonders (or indeed anyone else attending the games, won't be able to share photos or videos of their experiences on social networks. According to the site, any ticket holder with images, video, and sound recordings of the Games cannot use the content for anything other than private and domestic purposes. This extends to licensing, broadcasting, or publishing the content either via social networking sites, or the internet in general. Yikes.
Along with your own personal WiFi hotspot or 3G hub, you also won't be allowed to carry liquids, aerosols, or gels in quantities greater than 100ml; alcohol; tents, placards, spray paint; walkie-talkies, phone jammers or radio scanners; laser pointers or strobe lights; any item too large to be electronically screened; bikes; pets or other animals; any type of blade, knife or offensive weapons including blades and personal protection sprays; firearms; fireworks/explosives of any kind; controlled drugs; or items that resemble prohibited items such as gun replicas.
London 2012 also has a list of restricted items to go along with its restricted items. This includes any objects or clothing bearing political statements or "overt commercial identification intended for 'ambush marketing'" as well as large flags; over-sized hats; golf umbrellas; large photographic equipment measuring over 30cm; excessive amounts of food; balls, rackets, frisbees or other projectiles; noisemakers, such as air horns, whistles, klaxons and vuvuzelas; or flags of countries not participating in the Games (excluding the flags of nations under the umbrella of a participating country).
While it would likely be fairly easy to prevent people from bringing a lot of the above into the venues, we imagine it'll be a lot more difficult to keep people from setting up their own hotspots and even more difficult to prevent the posting of content to Facebook, Twitter, and other sites.