Orange Steps Up to Deliver "Most Connected" Olympic Games

Written by Kester Mann

I've been captivated by the Paris Olympic Games; like billions around the world, I've marvelled at the feats of Simone Biles, Leon Marchand, Keely Hodgkinson and many others. But I don't reckon too many people would have given much thought to connecting the world's greatest sporting spectacle.

This daunting responsibility fell to French operator Orange , which was assigned the role of sole connectivity provider for the first time in the history of the Olympics. Three years ago, at the Tokyo Olympics, there were five official providers.

The size of the task for Orange spanned 120 locations, more than 850 scheduled events, 15,000 athletes, at least 10 million visiting fans and a global TV audience. It's no wonder the operator says the event will be the "most connected" in the Olympics' history. This week, I headed over to Paris to see how it was getting on.

During a media briefing, Bertrand ROJAT , chief marketing and innovation officer for Orange Events, explained that the operator deployed a standalone private 5G network at five major venues, partnering with 思科 and 英特尔 . These included a 6 km stretch of the River Seine, Stade de France, Bercy Arena, Paris La Defense Arena and the Marseille marina. At the latter, ships stationed at sea were fitted with mobile antennas to support video coverage from cameras on competitors' boats.

This secure and dedicated network has formed the backbone of the Olympics Broadcast Service, which will have produced 11,000 hours of live TV for about 4 billion people worldwide by the time the curtain comes down on the event this weekend.

The characteristics of 5G standalone are crucial to enabling the high-throughput and low-latency requirements of broadcasters. It also means cameras can connect without wires, giving photographers more freedom to move and enabling them to instantly share images with press agencies.

Mr Rojat said the private network was configured to have 80% of its throughput in the uplink. This contrasts with the typical 20% share on a public network.

For the opening ceremony, broadcast coverage was supported by more than 200 Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra smartphones located on 170 vessels as competitors were ferried by water in a spectacular start to the 17-day extravaganza. This enabled HDR-quality images that wouldn't have been possible with traditional cameras that are heavy, expensive and have limited movement.

Orange has also been using a secure push-to-talk (PTT) solution called TeamConnect, enabled on 13,000 devices and running over its 4G network. The service offers prioritized communication, for example to security teams for crowd control, volunteers and medical staff. At previous Olympics, PTT services have relied on a TETRA, a narrowband standard for two-way radio communications.

On the broadband side, Orange deployed a unified IP network at 60 venues with a capacity of 100 Gbps. It offers about 100,000 Internet connections to enable services such as ticketing and security. On top of this, about 10,000 Wi-Fi access points have been made available to technical staff, media and the organizing committee.

For the public, Orange deployed about 50 temporary cell sites to bring greater capacity to packed venues. It has also permanently upgraded several locations, including the Stade de France, and used a technique called dynamic mechanism to optimize the use of spectrum to boost capacity. This was trialled at 2023's Rugby World Cup, also hosted in France.

I was fortunate enough to attend one of the athletics sessions at France's national stadium this week to put this to the test. Among 80,000 other fans, I had no trouble sending photographs, posting to social media and checking results online. At previous large-scale events, I've struggled to even make a phone call. Mr Rojat told me that during one of the rugby sevens matches at Stade de France, a whopping 2 TB of data traffic was transferred at the stadium in just one hour.

Orange isn't saying how much it spent providing infrastructure for the Olympics, but I suspect it was a substantial investment. Payback could be hard to quantify and only become apparent in different ways over several years. Interestingly, Mr Rojat was keen to stress that its efforts will enable it to offer new connectivity services to enterprise customers after the Olympics. This would support one of the company's leading goals of boosting its returns in the business sector. This legacy could form the real benchmark of success.

For now though, in terms of successfully navigating one of the toughest assignments in the company's history, at the Games of the XXXIII Olympiad, Orange is already on the finishing straight.

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