The starting gun on the Paris Olympics is just a week away, and with more than 15 million people expected to descend on the capital during the event, connectivity is a key concern for organisers.
Two hundred and six countries will be represented at the Olympics – which runs from 26 July to 11 August – while 184 countries will compete in the Paralympics, between 28 August and 8 September. Overall, around 15,000 athletes will compete in almost 900 events.
On top of this, there are broadcasters from across the world who will descend on Paris, who need robust connectivity to deliver their feeds back to their home nations. And millions of spectators who will want to use their mobile phones to post about the event, buy products, or track down their hotels.
That’s not to mention the four billion people expected to tune in around the world.
To ensure all of this goes off without a hitch, organisers turned to France’s biggest telco, naming Orange as connectivity partner for the 2024 Games.
Orange wants to deliver “the most connected competition in Olympic Games history”. Explaining the scale of the task Orange’s project lead for Paris Games Alexis Berger says:
“If you’re a fan, at home, a referee, organiser, journalist, you cannot live your passion and do your job without Orange. A referee cannot start a game if Orange is not ready. All of this is through our network.”
The last Olympics was held in Tokyo in 2021, having been delayed from the previous year due to Covid. Due to the shadow of the Covid pandemic, attendance was much smaller than organisers had planned.
Fearing connectivity challenges, the IOC and Tokyo organisers had turned to five telecoms providers to ensure a robust network that included both 5G and Wi-Fi. But in Paris, bosses chose a different route.
To power the Olympic connectivity, Orange is set to run a private 5G network throughout Paris.
“In France, we don’t use Wi-Fi, we use mobile networks,” explained Orange Events chief technology and information officer Bertrand Rojat.
The 5G network will provide capacity across 32 spots and 120 official sites across the city. It will also power the Olympics Broadcast Service, which will produce 11,000 hours of live TV.
“One thing that’s very important. In France, we don’t use Wi-Fi, we use mobile networks. If we go to a stadium and use the mobile, Wi-Fi is not the natural choice. So, the Wi-Fi in the venues that we are deploying is for media, for the organising committee, for all the technical staff.
“For the public, this is why we have enhanced all our mobile coverage, to enable mobile connectivity to all spectators including in big stadiums, all using our mobile network.”
Private 5G is a network that operates separately from Orange’s commercial network – a dedicated service constructed on a 6km stretch along the Seine for boating events, and in several venues including the Stade de France, Arena Bercy and Paris La Défense Arena.
The network uses the “standalone” version of 5G (5G SA), which means not just the radios but also the core of the network – the control centre for the entire system – has been upgraded beyond 4G.
This allows Orange to leverage network slicing capabilities that are one of the much-touted benefits of 5G SA. Slicing means operators can reserve a part of the network – called a slice – for a dedicated use case, guaranteeing performance on this virtual slice.
Orange’s private network solution, however, will use “dedicated infrastructure which runs alongside the commercial network,” explained Rojat. “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.”
The Olympics is one of the largest broadcasting events in the world, with nearly four billion viewers expected to tune into scenes from Paris this summer.
To guarantee the best footage, more cameras will be deployed in Paris 2024 than at any previous Games. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies alone will feature almost 500 cameras, compared with around 60 used at previous events. Around 200 of these will be smartphone cameras – Orange will use the Samsung Galaxy S24 handset – located on ships and boats forming a procession along the Seine, said Rojat.
These will leverage Orange’s private 5G network, which has been configured to have 80% of its throughput on the uplink. The French telco opted to partner with Cisco for both the core and radio access network, with hardware featuring Intel’s chipsets.
This marks a deviation from Orange’s public network, which is primarily supplied by traditional telecoms vendors Ericsson and Nokia.
An even bigger challenge, perhaps, will be at the Marina de Marseille, where the sailing events are set to take place. Vessels off the south coast of France will be fitted with cell antennas to screen competitors racing for gold.
Events like this require low latencies, which, according to telecoms vendors, is one of the key benefits of 5G SA. They also need high throughput to upload ultra-high-definition content to the production centre – known as the International Broadcasting Centre (IBC).
“This is why it is a fully separate network,” said Rojat. “We are using the full scope of what a 5G standalone network can provide, where we prioritise also the uplink.”
Despite Rojat’s earlier dismissal of Wi-Fi, it will feature at the event, but primarily to support “media partners, for the organising committee, for all the technical staff” he explained.
“It is a B2B Wi-Fi network. For the public, this is why we have enhanced all our mobile coverage.”
The network is underpinned by 100 gigabits, 60-site IP network featuring around 100,000 “internet plugs” connecting the media, cash machines, ticketing machines and other functions. It will also support around 10,000 access points.
Some sites will be temporary – around 50 moveable cell sites will be used during the Olympics – but Orange is also involved in permanently upgrading several venues, including the Stade De France.
The 100G network will plug into the IBC and the Technical Operations Centre, which are the two primary hubs for tech at any Olympic games.
In addition to the networks, Orange will also provide a push-to-talk (PTT) communications service that will be enabled on 13,000 devices.
The PTT service operates like a traditional walkie-talkie, except over mobile devices.
The goal is for staff members, the Olympic committee, athlete teams, volunteers, health and safety, and security teams to be able to communicate easily and securely.
The PTT devices are set to be connected with priority over the public network using a “special mechanism” on the company’s 4G network.
It is the first Olympics event where a PTT service has been run over an operator’s existing mobile network instead of a TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio) network. TETRA is a narrowband communications standard for two-way radio communications.
“It will be an Orange mobile network that will guarantee the availability and security of the communications,” added Rojat. “We will use mobile devices, too, which is a true innovation at the core of what Orange does.”
Under questions from journalists who joined the Orange press briefing, the French telco declined to share how much investment it had put in to upgrade its network ready for the Olympics, but putting this all together has been a “huge operation” the firm acknowledged.
Overall, a dedicated team of 1,000 staff has worked on the project and Orange began recruiting internally, from across its operations both in France and in other markets, to prepare for the opening ceremony.
“We think of the Olympics as an event with all of this tradition,” Berger explained. “But there is also a great history of innovation, some social, some in sports, and many of them technical.
“The technical innovations we have put in place are making those dreams of yesterday possible today. This, to us, is the essence of Paris 2024.”
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