Citius, altius, fortius, wireless: How Orange claimed Olympic gold

Unprecedented and responsible

To satisfy these stakeholders, Orange deployed what it called an unprecedented and responsible technological deployment. To support its work, the Paris 2024 Organising Committee gave Orange what was said to be the largest spectrum ever allocated to a mobile provider in the history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games.

For media, Orange developed an infrastructure to transmit images from the IBC to major international broadcasters and access control connectivity, and also provided services to broadcasters and photographers, including 5G private standalone (SA) networks at several major Olympic and Paralympic Games venues. These included the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and Paris La Défense Arena for swimming and water polo, and the marina and sea in Marseille for the sailing events.

For general 5G communications, Orange enhanced its public commercial network, running non-standalone, to maximise capacity from a radio perspective so as to accommodate spectator requirements. The company deployed 12 additional mobile cells in Paris for the opening ceremony, and added three cells at the marina and two at the Stade de France and other venues – 21 new cells in all – and implemented dynamic allocation of spectrum for optimum user experience.

The private 5G mobile technology was set up to provide an instant connection to photographers, without their cameras needing to be connected by wire in a limited area. This is said to have allowed for almost instant image sharing between photographers in the field and press agencies, in what Orange noted was a first at major scale for a sports competition in 2024.

To ensure redundancy in media transfer, the company also deployed a “huge” fibre network from all the venues to and from the IBC, which was also used to support an equally large-scale IP network running at 100 Gbps.

To anticipated what loads were likely to be applied on the network, Orange spent a considerable amount of time testing infrastructure at key sports events. Among these was the Rugby World Cup of 2023, for which Orange has worked for more than two and a half years to connect the tournament through a secure, ultra-high-speed broadcast contribution network, as well as providing all other connectivity required during the tournament.

Orange had strengthened its commercial mobile network in the knowledge that spectators at events and on the go would be using it for video streaming. Indeed, mobile traffic it measured at the French Open tennis championships at Roland Garros had produced some notable highs.

Fibre network hub

Orange also made extensive use of its existing fibre network hub at its Stade Orange Vélodrome in Marseilles, a short hop from where the Olympic sailing was based and which sees regular use in transporting high-quality video when football club Olympique de Marseille play. The arena also boasts France’s first 5G-equipped stadium, and in 2022, Orange showed its non-standalone core network comprising a 3.5GHz mid-band network complemented by mmWave 5G in the 26GHz range. There was also AWS Edge Capacity connected to an experimental 5G area and to a cloud/hybrid edge.

In addition, Orange focused on non-consumer communications with a walkie-talkie service using push-to-talk technology that was used by around 13,000 event organisers, emergency and security teams. The network allowed such personnel the ability to communicate by voice and video as a priority, securely operating on Orange’s 4G or 5G mobile network, providing instantaneous, multi-media and prioritised communications services – even when the network load was high.

Yet even given such preparation, Rojat revealed the past four weeks before the start of the games were “very hard” for his team, mainly due to the fact that it had to install equipment at a large number of temporary venues, very much including those for the opening ceremony. A number of these were still being built while Orange was on the ground with its comms equipment. “I think that was much more difficult than what we did expect,” he notes.

“You have logistic issues,” says Rojat. “You have energy issues. You have a lot of things that have to go together. And so that piece was clearly much, much harder than what was expected.”

That said, he stresses that due to a “very robust” technical design for the network, during the operational phase, Orange enjoyed “a much better time compared with what we could have expected.”

What was absolutely expected was huge loads on the Orange network from day one. The private network covered a 6km stretch of the Seine for the opening ceremony, where Orange assured coverage for the procession of 170 connected craft on the river, via 200 live-streamed smartphones with HD and 5G-enabled cameras.

The technology also enabled immersive live images through mobile mini-cameras connected to the private 5G network, to guarantee maximum data transfer with minimal latency. All these feeds were relayed in 4K quality using high dynamic range. Some 500 hours of content was transported for video streaming.

For the rugby sevens final, which took place in the opening days and was watched by 69,000 fans at the Stade de France, Orange saw 2 TB of traffic pass across its network per hour – an unprecedented amount for the company. Rojat noted that at its peak in the first week of the Games, the network was transporting around 11,000 images per hour.

While this was some achievement, it was petite bière compared with what happened to the network when Paris-born swimmer Léon Marchand took to the water. Marchand was hotly tipped for success way before he arrived at the Games, and while the world saw the swimmer cause a sensation as he rocketed through in the water, Rojat and his colleagues saw their network traffic soar commensurately.

Adding to what was going on at the Paris Olympic Aquatic Centre in Saint-Denis in the north of the French capital, other competitions at other venues were halted as spectators took to their smartphones to watch the multiple gold medal-winning French swimmer. Rojat remembers that during the 200m final on 31 July, the Orange network in Ile de France – the Paris area – recorded 100 TB of data traffic per hour on its mobile network.

“On that particular night, during the final, we had peak traffic on the overall Orange mobile network of more than 1.8 TB per second during the one hour of the slot of the final,” he says. “That was the first time ever we [have ever experienced such] traffic on our network. To be honest, we didn’t think that [there would be] so many people connected at same time to look at a video stream.

“What we usually see for a normal competition is that you have traffic just before the start of the of the game [and] after the game, but during the game itself, you see less traffic,” says Rojat. “That was the first time during the competition that we saw people using their smartphones to watch what was going on at other venues.”

In addition to its mobile infrastructure, Orange had deployed an IP fibre network at more than 60 venues to address the different needs the Olympic Organisation Committee, the media, logistics and other usages. Traffic on this ranged from 10 to 100 gigabits per second per venue. In terms of average peak of total traffic, Orange saw numbers at around 50 gigabits per second. In absolute terms, this was actually less than expected, but at the same level almost all the time. This told its own story, said Rojat: “It was very dense, very intense.”

Unique challenges

The Marseille nautical events brought about unique conditions and challenges in terms of communications. In a first for the Games, a key part of the video capture was done using specially optimised Samsung S 24 smartphones directly on board craft through a private 5G network. In total, it captured about 600 hours of live production on the 5G network.

Of all the learnings from the project, and something to pass on to his counterparts in LA, Rojat says it came as something of a surprise as to how fast things were going increasingly mobile. “On our IP network, we deployed more than 60,000 IP plugs, plus about 10,000 Wi-Fi access points,” he says. “Most of the traffic went on the Wi-Fi access point. So, there was very limited use of all the fixed IP plugs that we deployed.

“If you know you have a good Wi-Fi, when you have a good mobile network, people go wireless, and that was a big [finding] for us,” says Rojat. Another was the advantage of using a single operator for the broadcast and comms network. “Having a single [company] to manage all the connectivity requirements is also a key learning,” he says. “Having a single operator managing all the types of services makes a big difference in terms of efficiency, in terms of reliability, in terms of flexibility. You need a lot of flexibility to manage these events.”

And the LA team will also likely hear about Orange’s infrastructure sustainability, a key aspect of the Paris 2024 legacy, which focuses on repurposing equipment for other sites and uses after the Olympic Games. The telco and La Poste are teaming to ensure that several thousand Wi-Fi terminals and other advanced telecom equipment used at the Olympic and Paralympic sites will be reused by the French postal and banking service at key locations in Paris and other local communities.

These modern devices are seen as essential in improving La Poste’s network’s operational efficiency for employees, providing better connectivity and a high level of service both indoors and outdoors. The integration of this equipment will also play a role in supporting digitisation and new uses, aiming to provide smoother operations of IT tools. The Maison de l’Innovation in Nantes is set to house over 800 IT professionals from La Poste using the next-generation equipment.

Artificial intelligence

Looking to how he thinks LA’s network will be different to the one he managed, Rojat predicts a significant increase in the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in networks, especially where it can be deployed to improve the efficiency of operations.

“On the network side, we are starting to use more AI on incident management and prediction,” he says. “AI can be very efficient to identify potential failures or the start of failures, and also find very quickly the solution to resolve it.

“That’s something we are [still] really focusing on, and I would guess that’s definitely one area where AI can make a big difference for operation during the Olympics,” says Rojat. “When there is an incident, you have to react very, very quickly. So, I think that’s one area where AI can help a lot.”

LA, like all Olympics, will aim to be bigger and better than the event before: quicker, higher, stronger, as the official motto of citius, altius, forties translates to. Add to this more mobile and smarter from a technological perspective. The bar has just been raised.