“Private” 5G is gaining attention as a way to enhance sports broadcasting, and the 2024 Summer Olympics will see the mobile technology play a bigger role in sports coverage than ever before.
Orange, the French mobile phone company responsible for providing communications infrastructure and services for the Paris Olympics, is building a private 5G network along four kilometers of the Seine River to beam smartphone footage of the boats to a television production center, reports Ian Morris. Light Reading.
During the opening ceremony in Paris, more than 200 Samsung S24 Ultra smartphone cameras installed on 85 ships will be connected to Orange’s private 5G network. According to Orange, Samsung’s S24 smartphones are not only compatible with 5G Standalone (SA) technology, but also feature an “advanced software configuration to handle high-quality video streaming, including HDR.”
The same 5G technology is also being rolled out in several Paris venues, including the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and Paris La Défense Arena.
Bertrand Roja, chief marketing and innovation officer for Orange Events, argued in a recent conference call with reporters that traditional broadcast systems, including the cameras typically used at such events, would not be able to capture footage of the boats.
“If we want to get live footage of the athletes, we need to put cameras on the boat,” Rojat said. “Normal cameras won’t work. They’re too heavy, too expensive and too difficult to install.”
Of course, network slicing – allowing carriers to reserve parts of their public networks for private use – is nothing new and has been heavily touted as one of the benefits of 5G technology.
But Rojat says it’s a completely private network with dedicated infrastructure running alongside the commercial network – it uses a “standalone” (SA) version of 5G, so there’s not only a new radio network, but also a successor to the 4G “core” which is a software-based control centre for the whole system.
“We use different frequencies, we use different infrastructure so that, on the one hand, we can provide the quality of service that the public requires, and, on the other hand, we can meet the demands of television broadcasting.”
Another big selling point of standalone 5G deployments is low latency: Live broadcast TV requires data signals to have extremely low latency, measured in milliseconds, and enough capacity to upload ultra-high definition content to production centers.
“That’s why it’s a completely separate network,” Rojat explained. “We’re leveraging all the capabilities that a 5G standalone network can offer, and we’re prioritizing the uplink as well.”
As well as using private 5G for the Paris event, Orange is also installing mobile phone antennas on sailing boats in Marseille Marina, where the sailing event will be held.
Orange has teamed up with America’s Cisco for network equipment for the Paris Olympics, rather than its usual Nordic partners Ericsson or Nokia. Cisco’s core network products, powered by Intel chips, are already in use by operators such as Britain’s Vodafone and Japan’s Rakuten.
Orange is also beefing up its public 5G network, with about 50 of what Rojat called “mobile connectivity units” deployed at major sports venues, some permanently. This “dynamic mechanism,” piloted during last year’s Rugby World Cup in France, will allow Orange to optimize spectrum usage and increase capacity, he said.
“In France we don’t use Wi-Fi, we use mobile networks,” as Morris points out, despite the popularity of Wi-Fi networks at other sporting events, he adds somewhat dismissively.
“We are rolling out Wi-Fi, but it is for the media, the organizing committee and all the technical staff. It is a B2B Wi-Fi network. That’s why we have boosted all our mobile coverage for the public.”
The facility is supported by a 60-site IP network with a capacity of 100GB per second and about 100,000 “internet plugs” connecting journalists, cash machines, control systems for ticketing and other point-of-sale functions, Rojat said.
Equally important, Orange can control, manage and configure the IP network remotely. “This is a huge step forward for us,” says Rojat.
All eyes will be on Orange when the Summer Olympics open on July 26. “We will be the only operator providing all telecommunications services, whereas in Tokyo, for example, there were five operators,” Rojat noted. “That’s … a big responsibility.”
Read more: Orange rejects slicing, chooses Cisco private 5G for Olympics (Light Reading)
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