“Private” 5G is gaining traction as a way to bolster sporting broadcasts, and the mobile technology will play a bigger role in sports broadcasting than it ever has at the 2024 Summer Olympics.
French mobile carrier Orange, charged with providing the telecom infrastructure and services for the Paris Olympics, has built a private 5G network along a 6km stretch of the Seine to convey smartphone boat footage to the TV production center, as Iain Morris reports at Light Reading.
During the Paris opening ceremony, more than 200 Samsung S24 Ultra smartphone cameras installed on 85 boats will be linked to Orange’s private 5G network. Samsung’s S24 smartphones are not only compatible with 5G stand-alone (SA) technology, according to Orange, but also have “an advanced software configuration to handle the video streaming with high quality, including HDR.”
The same 5G technology is also being deployed at several venues in Paris, including the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and Paris La Défense Arena.
The boat footage would be impossible to capture with traditional broadcast systems, including the cameras normally used at these events, Bertrand Rojat, chief marketing and innovation officer for Orange Events, maintained during a recent call with reporters.
“If you want to have live images from the athletes, you need to have cameras on the boats,” Rojat said. “It’s just not possible with regular cameras. It’s too heavy, too expensive, too difficult to deploy.”
Of course, network slicing, which allows operators to reserve part of a public network for private use, is nothing new, and has been heavily touted as one of the benefits of 5G technology.
But this, Rojat says, is a fully private network with a dedicated infrastructure running alongside the commercial network. It utilizes a “standalone” (SA) version of 5G, meaning there is not just a new radio network but also a successor to the 4G “core,” the software-based control center of the entire system.
“We are using different frequencies, we are using different infrastructure, just to make sure we can on one side provide the quality of service required for the public and on the other side we can meet what is required for TV broadcast.”
Another big selling point for standalone 5G deployments is low latency. Live broadcast television requires extremely low latency, with data signals measured in fractions of milliseconds, as well as sufficient capacity for uploading ultrahigh-definition content to production centers.
“This is why it is a fully separate network,” Rojat explains. “We are using the full scope of what a 5G standalone network can provide, where we prioritize also the uplink.”
Besides using private 5G for Paris events, Orange is installing cell antennas on sailing vessels at the Marina de Marseille, where sailing events will be held.
Rather than its usual Nordic partners Ericsson and Nokia, Orange has teamed with US-based Cisco for the network equipment for the Paris Olympics. Featuring Intel chips, Cisco’s core network products are already in use by carriers including Vodafone in the UK and Rakuten in Japan.
Orange is also bolstering it public 5G networks, and roughly 50 “mobile connectivity units,” as Rojat calls them, are being deployed at major sports venues, some of them permanently. This “dynamic mechanism,” trialed at last year’s Rugby World Cup, which also took place in France, allows Orange to optimize spectrum use and boost capacity, he said.
“In France, we don’t use Wi-Fi. We use mobile networks,” he added, somewhat dismissively, as Morris notes, despite the popularity of Wi-Fi networks at other sporting events.
“We are deploying Wi-Fi, but it is for media, for the organizing committee, for all the technical staff. It is a B2B Wi-Fi network. For the public, this is why we have enhanced all our mobile coverage.”
The setup is supported by a 60-site IP network, which has a capacity of 100GB per second and boasts about 100,000 “Internet plugs,” said Rojat, to connect journalists, cash machines, control systems for ticketing, and other point-of-sale features.
Just as important, Orange can control, manage and set up the IP network remotely. “That is for us a very big step forward,” Rojat said.
All eyes will be on Orange when the summer games open on July 26. “We will be the sole operator to deliver all the telecommunication services, where for example in Tokyo there were five operators,” Rojat pointed out. “It is… a big responsibility.”
READ MORE: Orange spurns slicing and opts for Cisco private 5G at Olympics (Light Reading)
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