International Island Games: Pop-up private 5G networks offer opportunity for smaller sporting events

Held every two years, the International Island Games sees athletes from across the globe compete in a variety of sporting events, including athletics, swimming, triathlon, football, gymnastics, badminton, archery, cycling and, fittingly for islands, sailing. This year they were held on Orkney from 12-18 July.

The games were live streamed to YouTube by Mallard Productions. However, providing wireless connectivity to support broadcast production at venues across the remote Scottish islands was a challenge, not least due to the very real potential for extreme weather such as strong winds and driving rain even at the height of summer.

The games provided a testbed for Scottish software-defined radio specialist Neutral Wireless, working with the University of Strathclyde and the event’s official communications infrastructure provider CloudNet IT Solutions, to demonstrate the ability and suitability of pop-up private 5G networks to support live broadcast production in unpredictable environments.

In order to provide live coverage of sports from multiple full HD camera feeds for production from a variety of locations around Orkney, Neutral Wireless set up three separate 5G standalone (SA) private networks supporting multi-camera live feeds from the triathlon, golf and athletics competitions.

A range of user equipment was connected to the network to support broadcasting, including Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultras, Apple iPhones and 5G modems. CloudNet IT Solutions also provided backhaul connectivity for the private 5G networks, including both wired backhaul infrastructure and Starlink satellite connectivity, ensuring uplink bandwidth from even the most remote event sites. The bespoke 5G network ran entirely on batteries, including the private 5G base stations.

Simple yet effective

The simplicity of the multiple wireless cameras available to the production demonstrated how small or regional sports events can now benefit from multi-camera, HD live broadcast-quality coverage without the need for expensive or complex traditional infrastructure. Even in rural, remote and logistically challenging environments. In addition, the production was based on affordable off-the-shelf devices and presented a significant step towards increased accessibility to lower-tier and regional event adoption.

Indeed, Neutral Wireless observed that such a diverse, non-premium-level technology mix showed that producers could have the flexibility to integrate private 5G into various types of production workflows – from mobile journalism to full-scale outside broadcasts, adjusting the network configuration according to the specific needs of an event.

“There are now pop-up solutions available from lots of companies, including the tier one radio vendors. One of our partners did another project with a pop-up network from a tier one [communications technology provider] and it arrived in a shipping container. Yes, you plug it in and you get your network, but that’s not really portable. Our network in Orkney was deployed on the back of a bike,” explains Neutral Wireless senior systems engineer Sam Yoffe.

“There’s also a big difference between the infrastructure as well as the pricing model from tier one vendors. They’re mostly using mobile network operator (MNO) style hardware, which means that the networks are configured for downlink. But the broadcast use case in particular is so uplink heavy, even if you do deploy one of these [tier one class MNO] networks, you just don’t get that much uplink [data].”

Yoffe adds that the specific bandwidth and data requirement totally depend on the workflow for a project. For Orkney, most of the video feeds were being landed locally and the production was also happening locally. This meant high-capacity internet backhaul was not mission critical.

“For example, the Opening Ceremony at Paris 2024 had over 200 feeds, but they weren’t all going to the internet – they were going to a local production. You don’t need the backhaul internet connection to take all of your feeds if your production is local. In Orkney, we were producing a programme feed that we were then streaming, so actually the uplink only needed to be [running at] 10-15Mbps. You don’t need say 200Mbps up to be dealing with all of your feeds. If you were doing an entire cloud-based workflow then you would need better backhaul access to the internet, but that’s not the workflow that we were using.”

Another key issue is that the event on Orkney, and the broadcast of small sporting events in general, was boosted tremendously by the quality and quantity of wireless spectrum made available by UK communications and broadcast regulator Ofcom. The networks were operated using low power shared access licences (SALs) from Ofcom using shared spectrum in the n77 band (3.8 to 4.2GHz).

At the beginning of July 2025, Ofcom put out a new consultation on making a portion of the 2.3GHz (n40) wireless band available for short duration licences and the main use case highlighted is for programme-making and special events (PMSE).

“That’s a really big opportunity for these smaller events, or maybe anything that is organised at short notice or on a week-by-week basis. There is now a licensing regime that fits those kinds of productions,” notes Dani Anderson, senior communications engineer at Neutral Wireless.

“Things like Orkney, things like the major sporting events and festivals, anything where you’ve got significant advanced planning: you can do the SAL spectrum applications. But for this kind of pop-up network that is here today, maybe here tomorrow, maybe gone the day after, there’s now a licensing regime to support that. So between that, and the price point of the equipment, I think there is a real opportunity for smaller events and smaller sporting institutes to cover their own events or have their events covered.”

In terms of the licensing application process, Anderson believes that the procedure for Orkney was also helped by it having a set event schedule which his company could plan around, knowing where all of the events were happening. “That’s perfect for the existing shared access licensing scheme. We’ve got a lot of experience in using that [spectrum] band and that highlights what a good job Ofcom has done in making that band available in the UK. For Orkney, it was as a testament to how good the shared access licence is in the UK.”

By contrast, Anderson regards spectrum acquisition on some projects outside the UK as being challenging, requiring at times a lot more direct contact with individual national regulators because they don’t all have frameworks similar to those set up by Ofcom. He stressed that to run commercial services or what he calls “real production” deployments, then you need a framework like the SAL.

Taking stock of what was a success in terms of production, Neutral Wireless believes that the key lesson it can bring forward is that such affordable production is possible without breaking the bank.

In addition to covering events on land and at sea – as it did for the maritime events in Marseille for Paris 2024 – the next area of interest to the company is to support broadcast production using an ultralight motorised (ULM) aircraft flying at 300-500 metres to cover events such as cycling. Having conquered islands, the company is literally reaching for the skies.