Orange’s Bertrand Rojat reflects on an ‘unprecedented technological deployment’ at the Paris Olympics

When it comes to covering the Olympic Games on TV, the dream scenario is finding a local hero who captures the nation’s attention and makes his or her events an unmissable viewing experience. If you are in charge of the mobile and fixed network on which a rather unexpectedly large portion of that viewing will take place, the mission is not about dreams, it’s preventing a nightmare. Just ask Bertrand Rojat about the recent Paris Games.

Rojat is chief marketing & innovation officer at the events division of global telco Orange, which was the exclusive operator for the Paris 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Games, charged with connecting more than 120 venues and the equivalent of 32 world championships at the same time. This covered major stadiums such as the Stade de Marseille and the Stade de France; major public areas such as Les Invalides, airports, railway stations and training centres; and iconic locations such as the Marina de Marseille and even Tahiti.

For what the operator called “an unprecedented and responsible technological deployment”, Orange assured its infrastructure would enable “the best” connectivity experience in the history of the Olympic and Paralympic Games for four billion television viewers. And, in doing so, the operator decided it could eschew some standard broadcast methodologies and use advanced wireless and mobile telephone broadcasting.

“Leon Marchand grabbed gold medals and smashed world records almost every time he took to the water. A record he didn’t train for, nor probably knows about, is the mobile video workload”

To reduce any pressure this could cause, Orange spent a considerable amount of time testing its sports broadcasting set up at a number of sporting events in its domestic market, such as the 2023 Rugby World Cup and its existing broadcast network hub at Stade Orange in Marseilles, a short hop from where the Olympic sailing was based.

Yet there’s always a large gap between theory and practice and Rojat admits that the four weeks before the start of the games were “very hard”, mainly due to the fact that the company had to set up broadcast and comms equipment at a large number of temporary venues, including those for the Opening Ceremony. A number of these were still being built while the Orange team was deploying its comms equipment.

“I think that was much more difficult than what we expected,” he recalls. “We also had to work with all our teams from other venues and help others. You have logistics issues; you have energy issues; you have a lot of things that have to go together. And so that piece was clearly much harder than what was expected. It was a few difficult weeks. Very intense weeks.”

But what of nightmare scenarios? One concerned a security incident which every Games host country has to prepare for and, from a broadcast and network perspective, another was the weather. But, apart from the heavy rain during the Opening Ceremony, the weather was regarded as relatively good for Orange. Moreover, Rojat stresses that due to a “very robust” technical design for the network, during the operational phase Orange enjoyed “a much better time compared to what could have been expected”.

One thing that wasn’t expected was the sheer volume of mobile video coverage when French swimmer Léon Marchand was in competition. The Tolouse-born athlete arrived at the Games with high hopes of success in a number of events, but nobody could have predicted just how successful he would eventually be, grabbing gold medals and/or smashing world records almost every time he took to the water. A record he didn’t train for, nor probably knows about, is the mobile video workload.

Orange had strengthened its commercial mobile network in the knowledge that spectators at events and on the go would be using it for video streaming. Indeed, mobile traffic from video at the French Open at Roland-Garros had produced some notable highs, just not on the scale experienced during Marchand’s events, especially the 200m final, Rojat recalls.

“On that particular night, during the final, we had peak traffic on the overall Orange mobile network of more than 1.8TB per second during the one hour of the slot of the final. That was the first time ever we [have experienced such] traffic on our network. To be honest, we didn’t think that [there would be] so many people connected at the same time to look at a video stream. What we usually see for a normal competition is that you have traffic just before the start of the game and after the game, but during the game itself, you see less traffic. That’s the first time during competition that we saw people using their smartphone to watch what was going on at other venues.”

In addition to the mobile infrastructure, Orange deployed an IP fibre network at more than 60 venues to address the different needs of the Olympic Organising Committees, the media, logistics and other usages. Traffic on this ranged from 10 to 100 gigabit per second per venue. In terms of average peak of total traffic, Orange saw numbers at around 50 gigabits per second. In absolute terms this was actually less than expected but at the same level almost all the time. This told its own story, says Rojat: “It was very dense, very intense, which shows that a lot of content goes on our IP networks.”

Plain sailing

In terms of challenges, and indeed environment, the Marseilles nautical events brought about unique conditions for network broadcast. Orange leant in on the established Stade Orange fibre network that sees use in transporting high-quality broadcast video when Olympique de Marseille play football. But Rojat notes that as far as Orange was concerned, the biggest issues to address came in terms of video capture on the high seas.

“Part of the video capture was done with traditional means, which is high frequency technologies with helicopters, but a second part was done using smartphones as cameras directly on the board, done by using a private 5G network that we were operating,” he explains. “We used Samsung S24 smartphones that were specially optimised, especially in terms of video quality. We also did some specific optimisation with Samsung on the handover mechanism for the network. It was very much used for the production. The quality of the video was just amazing – it was very close to the athletes. When we talk about immersive video, it was really immersive. In total, we did about 600 hours of live production on our 5G network attack. Not everything was used for production, but for the international signal, we did 500 hours of production.”

Looking back at the project as a whole with a calm head in late Autumn 2024, Rojat reveals a number of surprises and learnings. One of these is that everything is going increasingly mobile. Asked what he would do differently to Paris if he were preparing for the Los Angeles 2028 Games, he concedes that would be difficult to answer in great detail right now but that he’d definitely negotiate to more time for fit out at any temporary venues.

Interestingly, Rojat has visited his equivalent in LA, given knowledge transfer was a key part of the Olympics contract. In terms of the broadcast infrastructure, Rojat predicts that in LA there will be a marked increase in the use of AI in networks compared to Paris. “What we see is there is [more AI] already on the video side. There are a lot of areas where you can really improve the efficiency of your operation using AI on the video side, for post-production and even during production, for colour balancing. All of these kinds of things can be done automatically with good AI software. On the network side, we are starting to use more AI on incident management and prediction. AI can be very efficient to identify potential failures or start of failure.”

Thanks to Hollywood, LA is all about making dreams come true. And for broadcast networks, the job for the 2028 Games will be to make sure that, just as in Paris, dreams never became nightmares.