The Milano Cortina Winter Olympics was nothing if not spectacular. It was the Games of the ice skating grace of Alysa Liu, the back-flipping acrobatics of Ilia Malinin, and for UK eyes, the historic double skeleton golds won by Matt Weston – one with Tabitha Stoecker in the team event – plus the snowboarding success of Charlotte Bankes and Huw Nightingale. And these UK eyes, as well as everyone else’s, witnessed this spectacle in the highest of broadcast quality.

This was made possible through the latest in standard broadcast technology equipment and innovations in wireless content acquisition such as the use of drones tracking snow jumpers as they took off high in the Dolomites. Similar devices followed speed skaters from shoulder level just tens of metres behind. No matter the technical challenges in doing so, in particular relating to the underlying network supporting broadcast, the action stayed on the screen, just as specifically intended by the underlying network provider HPE.

Speaking just after the games had begun, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) VP CTO industrial strategy and CTO of media, entertainment, hospitality and sports James Robertson stated clearly the mission ahead: “What we want to really make sure of is that the story of the Games is in front of the camera, not behind. Look at what these athletes are doing and the performances that they’re giving. This is what has to be paramount at these Games.”

HPE arrived in Italy on the back of delivering a successful network at the now legendary Ryder Cup at Bethpage Black Golf Course in New York in September 2025. This deployment saw the installation of a private 5G and WiFi network on what was then an unprecedented scale, offering a personalised, immersive experience driven by rich content.

As he made his assurances which time told came to light, Roberston outlined the even more unprecedented scale of the networking deployment that his company had made. The Ryder Cup network offered end-to-end, edge-to-edge with coverage over an area of 1,500 acres. Milano Cortina 2026 covered an area of some 22,000sqkm – the most geographically dispersed Olympics in history – with more than 40 sites at over 15 venues, with action from 3,000 athletes participating in 116 events covering 19 disciplines.

This meant that from a technological basis, HPE had to deliver something unprecedented in terms of connectivity and data security with the highest levels of stability, capacity, performance and scale. In practical terms, that meant creating a network connecting a multitude of devices for athletes, media, broadcasters and fans alike across more than 7.5% of Italy’s territory.

Yet, delivering a network at scale to millions of TV viewers is just what it means to be an official networking partner, noted Giuseppe Civale, director of ICT infrastructure and venue technologies for the Milano Cortina 2026 Winter Olympics. And that network has to be capable of supporting the highest quality video through the most novel ways. 

“Our network needs the highest grade of performance and stability – from the datacentre down to each access point. We’re serving an unprecedented amount of high‑resolution 8K footage to more than 200 rights holders that will eventually broadcast the Games to the world. Trust has to be inherent along with scalability and security,” Civale stated. 

“The scale of any Olympics is enormous by nature. This year’s Games are no exception. As the action, grandeur and drama stream their way across the globe, it’s all being delivered by millions of secure connections so it can be viewed by billions. The Games are built on unrepeatable athletic moments that occur live in the venue, and broadcast remotely to the world.”

To fulfil these needs, HPE implemented a network comprising over 4,900+ access points; more than 1,500 EX Ethernet switches; 70+ Juniper MX universal routers; 50+ SRX next‑gen firewalls; 30+ smart session routers; and more than 40 connected venues and locations. 

For a deployment of such massive scale, network management had to lean heavily on agentic AI capabilities to diagnose problems in the network before they occurred. Broadcast content acquisition and delivery figured highly among the anticipated network stresses.

“The scale of any Olympics is enormous by nature. This year’s Games are no exception. As the action, grandeur and drama stream their way across the globe, it’s all being delivered by millions of secure connections so it can be viewed by billions”

Ensuring uninterrupted live broadcasts, facilitating rapid content dissemination and supporting interactive fan engagement were regarded by HPE as unseen challenges to address. Another was that in addition to the two main event locations being more than 400km apart, it had to deal with different types of unknowable weather conditions and network traffic loads, noted HPE senior sales director, South Europe networking, Stefano Andreucci.

“The network is one of the most advanced [of its kind] that we have ever built [for a sports event]. Look at the numbers. But traditional networks are not enough for these kinds of games. They were not designed to do AI-native automation, end-to-end automation and real-time adaptability. We didn’t want to only move data from A to B: we wanted to deliver a great experience… to the media.”

For Robertson, the network for the Winter Olympics had to be secure by design, delivering proven performance at a global scale and then delivering actionable real-time insights. 

“The network foundation is incredibly important for every experience that we want to put on top [of it]. We are fundamentally behind organisations making sure that they deliver the experiences they need that drive the requirements that they need to perform. This all starts with this foundation,” the former CNN exec said.

“Just think of the enormity of the scale of what’s going on here at the Olympics, spread out across all of Northern Italy, all the way into the mountains. We [needed] to make sure that we’re driving a fabric… so that we know for sure that the things that are happening on the infrastructure are the things that are expected.”

The SVG Europe Winter Sports Forum, supported by NEP and Appear, will take place on 26 March at NEP’s Oslo Broadcast Centre. For more information and to register visit svgeurope.org/winter-sports-2026

To that end, the network also included the HPE Mist AIOPs platform to support full-stack, self-driving operations. Mist AI is designed to support optimised network performance and saw use in learning traffic patterns to gain advanced knowledge of potential bottlenecks, whether from an athlete accessing real-time performance data, a fan connecting with the Olympic app or more importantly a broadcaster streaming video.

HPE Marvis Copilot was implemented to further enhance AI-based network health and management with conversational, interactive understanding, offering real-time network analytics and enabling proactive troubleshooting and optimising user experiences such as that for video.

And anyone who watched any of the action from Milano Cortina could not offer many complaints regarding the video coverage. Across the swathes of Italian territory, quality bars were raised for both the athletes and the broadcasters. And, just as Robertson asked for right at the beginning, the action stayed very much in front of the camera and on the millions of viewers’ screens.