Formula E recently celebrated its tenth birthday, with the ‘green’ racing championship now bigger than ever.
Launched in 2014 as a sustainable alternative to Formula One, the single -seater race series sees 22 drivers representing 11 teams in 16 races across 10 global venues. According to the FIA, around 400 million people tune in to watch the electric cars race.
Like its Formula One cousin, there is a massive machine behind the motorsport, with staff moving an entire data centre and broadcast facility to a new venue every two weeks.
But unlike other major motorsports, Formula E isn’t raced inside stadiums or existing tracks like Silverstone. Instead, races take place in cities, or in parks, or conference centres, which may not be designed for a broadcasting behemoth.
“There is a culture within our organisation that we want to push the envelope,” explains Formula E vice president of technology Eric Ernst.
“Where we go is a parking lot or a grass field in the middle of nowhere, and we have to run a high availability data centre set-up quickly.
“That’s why we need to opt for technologies that guarantee reasonable service level agreements (SLAs) but can be flexible.”
Take the final race of Season 10 of Formula E, which was a double header for the championship. The FE team transformed London’s Excel Centre – normally home to global tech conferences and Comic Con – into a racetrack, fanzone, pit lane, and broadcasting hub. They had a week to carry out most of the turnaround.
One of the biggest challenges, Ernst explains, is setting up a private network in some locations would either be extremely complex, expensive, or have poor environmental outcomes. These considerations led Formula E to run all its broadcasting and connectivity across the public internet, as part of an agreement with Tata Communications.
Tata Group’s involvement in Formula E goes beyond its role as a communications partner, with Tata Consultancy Services – another division of the Indian conglomerate – also sponsoring Team Jaguar Racing’s car since 2021
Tata Communications – which is the telecoms division of the firm – is one of only a handful of global Tier 1 networks who together form the internet backbone we all use on a daily basis.
Tier 1 networks exchange traffic with each other on a settlement-free interconnection basis – ie no fees are paid for traffic in either direction. This has long been a key component of keeping the internet public, making it much more accessible.
Formula E’s cousin F1 uses a private network (also coincidentally provided by Tata) to provide broadcasting and connectivity services, linked back to its media and technology centre in Biggin Hill, London. But Formula E took a different road.
In February 2023, Tata Communications was unveiled as the official broadcast distribution provider to the Formula E World Championship in what it described as a “multi-year strategic relationship”.
The agreement sees Tata deliver high-definition, high-resolution and high-speed live broadcast content to viewers around the world as part of Formula E’s remote broadcast production of live races, reducing the environmental impact typical of major live international sports events on TV.
Tata’s software-defined media edge platform delivers more than 160 live video and audio signals from Formula E races across continents within milliseconds, using 26 media edge locations across North America, Europe and Asia.
Production takes place remotely – at the former home of the BBC in London -and it is all carried over the public internet.
Prior to onboarding Tata, Formula E was using what Ernst describes as a “legacy solution” involving more traditional forms of broadcasting – such as satellite – and connectivity.
“Before we came on board, the solution was being forced to fit with the sport,” explains Tata Communications vice president & global head, Media & Entertainment Business Dhaval Ponda.
“When we first started having conversations with Eric, our solution wasn’t as prevalent in the industry. We were quite fortunate because it takes the right sort of CTO to take a stand and adopt a future-proof solution.
“We loved the challenge of providing connectivity to Formula E and embarked on using public Internet leveraging edge-based distribution for video because FE required a unique solution.”
By this, he means Tata was tasked with providing connectivity that could be supplied almost anywhere, without laying specialised infrastructure such as fibre cables or private Wi-Fi networks.
“Tata was one of the few vendors offering a solution that could do everything needed and be deployed at this scale,” adds Ponda.
“Even now, when we talk with other organisations about our partnership, they are often surprised at the scale of what we deliver using public internet and edge-based delivery.”
Ernst agrees, saying that Tata’s global reach and experience of operating in multiple markets also makes it easier when accessing infrastructure. If they had picked another partner, they may have ended up using part of Tata’s network, or would have had to strike individual agreements with other organisations, and this is something Tata Com takes care of for Formula E.
“It was a no-brainer to cut out the middleman,” he adds. “The size of the network, the size of their partners that they have to distribute that last mile of Internet in a reliable way with monitoring with permits is pretty much unique in the market.
“And Tata is unlike any other partner – it is a communications company that has a massive technology company behind it, so we keep on pushing each other.”
Enterprises will often turn to dark fibre or other private options for large scale connectivity, due to concerns around security, latency and performance. Traditionally, broadcast events would involve some kind of OB setup located on site.
And while there is a tech centre located on site, the editing is all done in London, so for Formula E and Tata, this is where edge computing plays a vital role.
By deploying 26 media edge locations across the US, Europe and Asia, Tata is able to carry out processing much closer to the action, allowing it to reduce latency when transferring from the 85 cameras deployed during a race.
Tata Communications says its media edge cloud is capable of enabling very low latency video processing from any venue using first-mile internet while processing and distributing the video signals to any platform globally with high availability.
Ponda explains: “In terms of cloud and edge deployment, we have a very rigorous way in which we choose the technology. A lot of the infrastructure we own ourselves and that gives us a very unique sort of capability in terms of leveraging that.
“In terms of the infrastructure planning, design and architecture, we look at how it is deployed globally in a secure manner.
“Secondly, we look at the automation and tools around it. You cannot really operate in an environment where you have a lot of manual intervention because manual intervention is weak and you’re always a step back in terms of how quickly you’re able to fix it. So, a lot of focus goes into automating and we go through scenario analysis to test our network, to see what might break it.”
Finally, he points to teamwork as a key component. Tata is offering a managed service, and its team works closely with Formula E on delivering its platform, including a team on the ground available to assist during race day.
Ernst agrees, saying the two teams had formed a close bond while deploying Tata’s solution.
Regarding security, he explains: “Our biggest security concern is a framework of confidentiality, integrity and availability but, most importantly, the availability part.
“We have secured this with the redundant passes into that cloud network and we go to great lengths to communicate across the teams to make sure that we fully understand the diversity that these routes have.”
However, there can still be challenges, for example, when major incidents occur on the internet, such as the recent CrowdStrike outage.
“Those are risks you take when you go with this technology,” he admits. “But you’re not necessarily safeguarded if you use dark fibre either – it is a bit of a false economy because a lot of the security concerns happen at the application level now.”
Those applications, he adds, already come with buffers and encryption that offer a level of security irrespective of whether you are operating over a private or public network.
Ernst acknowledges this may not work for everyone. “If I worked in a different sport, with a different audience , maybe dark fibre is something I would throw into the mix. But for what we do, this solution is absolutely the best approach.”
Another key consideration – one that is at the heart of Formula E as an organisation – was to make sure its approach to any technology is as environmentally friendly as possible.
This was achieved by specially designed data centre equipment that can be shipped from location to location by freight with minimal footprint. And anything that can be done remotely helps to reduce the carbon footprint.
“For us, that is just day-to-day,” adds Ernst. “It is built into the ethos of this sport.”
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