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Orange claims gold in Olympic mobile coverage
Telco reveals the challenges and triumphs in connecting more than 120 venues to assure the best connectivity experience for an estimated 15 million spectators and four billion television viewers
Two weeks after the Paris Olympics officially started with its spectacular opening ceremony, and after athletes across all disciplines have broken records with their endeavours on roads, rivers and tracks, the official network infrastructure provider of the Games, Orange, has revealed it has had to contend with equally record-breaking traffic on its networks, supporting both consumer and operational experiences.
After the Covid-affected Tokyo event, the Paris Games have been the first since Rio 2016 to be fully open to spectators. Orange was appointed as exclusive operator for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, charged with connecting more than 120 venues and the equivalent of 32 world championships at the same time, assuring the best connectivity experience for the estimated four billion television viewers and 15 million spectators expected to attend the Games.
The infrastructure has covered major stadiums such as the Stade de Marseille and the Stade de France, through major areas such as the Invalides, to airports, railway stations, training centres, as well as iconic and unusual locations such as the Marina de Marseille, hosting sailing events, and the French Polynesian island of Tahiti, where sports such as surfing have been held.
To support the work of the operator, 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.
From a fulfilment perspective, Orange said it needed to address three main “customers”: the Olympic Games organising committee, the general public and broadcasters. For the organising committee, it provided communications services for the opening ceremony, fan zones and hospitality venues, as well as transmitting images from the international broadcasting centre (IBC) to major international broadcasters.
Before the Games began, Orange assured that its infrastructure would enable no less than “the best” connectivity experience in the history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games through what the company called an unprecedented and responsible technological deployment. Orange’s responsibilities also included internet connectivity, local LAN/Wi-Fi networks and associated cyber security for the 120 Olympic locations and more than 800 scheduled events, as well as interconnections between systems and the live broadcasting of images. Wi-Fi supported exclusively non-public B2B services for the Olympic family.
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.
Maximising capacity
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. To achieve optimum experience, it also used its latest technologies for dynamic allocation of spectrum.
Such optimisation was needed. Speaking with Computer Weekly, Bertrand Rojat, chief technology and information officer at Orange Events, revealed that for the rugby sevens final, 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.
In addition, while swimming finals that included Leon Marchand were taking place, other competitions at other venues were halted as spectators took to their smartphones to watch the multiple gold medal-winning French swimmer. Rojat said that 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 when Marchand was in the water.
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.
Rojat said that at its peak in the first week of the Games, the network was transporting around 11,000 images per hour. To ensure redundancy in media transfer, the company had 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.
The private network also covered a 6km stretch of the Seine for the opening ceremony, where Orange said it had delivered coverage with movement for the 170 connected boats on the river, with coverage watched by a billion TV viewers via 200 live-streamed smartphones, HD and 5G-enabled cameras. The technology also enabled the increasing number of 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.
Huge deployment
Rojat stressed just what a huge deployment the opening ceremony was, not just in terms of technology installed on bridges along the length of the Seine, but also in terms of timelines and dealing with the deluge on the night itself. “If you think how it can work, you need IP everywhere, and then you had to deal with the weather as well,” he said. “We had to deal with the fact that [the organisers] closed the bridges only 10 days before the ceremony.”
These were not the only technology challenges faced by Rojat and his team. He quipped that the first technology challenge was that this was the first time his team was doing what it was doing. Relaying experiences from the opening ceremony and sailing events, he said: “The first thing is you deploy the network and then you optimise it, especially for [cell] handover, because you have mini cells, and you need to have to be able to switch from cell to cell. We only had two days to do the optimisation. For the opening ceremony, we had an overlay network, and we also put some cells on wheels to have better capacity to the public network. For the cells on wheels, we had about 10 days to do the tuning adjustment of the network. For the private network, we had two days to do it.
“The challenge is very logistics [based],” said Rojat. “You have to stage the devices, and you have to set up the devices just before you go into production. There is a lot of manual work controlling the devices. Once it’s on the boat, you can’t touch it anymore, so we worked a lot at software to make sure that we can continue to control the device after we started the ceremony. These are the kind of challenges we’ve been facing at the marina, communication with [cameras] on the relay boats. They communicate in Wi-Fi with the shore. We spent quite a bit of time to find the right setup, and we did that because we didn’t want to use traditional tracking hotels with a helicopter.”
Orange regards its 5G private networks provision as offering a vision of how operators will deliver their networks “as a service” in the future, opening up new revenue streams for the industry. Furthermore, it was seen as a source of insight into how other businesses beyond sports broadcasting will use 5G to drive innovation in their own business.
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Among these other businesses was operations. In the Olympics deployment, Orange delivered a new-generation walkie-talkie service using push-to-talk technology that was used by around 13,000 event organisers, emergency and security teams to communicate by voice and video as a priority and securely operating on Orange’s 4G or 5G mobile network. These were designed to provide instantaneous, multi-media and prioritised communications services, even when the network load was high.
Looking ahead to the Paralympics, which start on 28 August, Orange revealed that its Labs will unveil the fruits of work with tech giants such as Cisco and Intel, as well as startups such as Touch2See and BodyCap. In a partnership with the latter, Orange has been working to develop ParaLive, offering Paralympian athletes the chance to monitor their physical status and mitigate any potential lack of body sensitivity and thermoregulation issue. By ingesting a connected capsule, data can be processed in real time on Orange’s Live Objects IoT platform, with athletes benefiting from the precise monitoring of their body temperature to prevent dehydration or stress.
Touch2See has a product aiming to improve inclusivity for blind and partially sighted people at major sporting events. The result is a smart haptic tablet depicting a miniature sports pitch, which can reproduce a ball’s movements in real-time on the surface of the tablet through a 5G connection.
Asked if he had any advice to give to the person that would be doing his job at the Los Angeles Games in 2028, Rojat said the team there should really go as wireless as possible. What this possibility will be in four years and what wireless technology will be doing the heavy lifting is anyone’s guess. 5G Advanced? Wi-Fi 8? Whatever path Los Angeles takes, a clear Olympic benchmark has been established in Paris.
