Broadcasting the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships
The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) set the biggest ever cycling event in the world to date, the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships, in Scotland. To deliver a successful event, Commsworld was tasked with providing a Wide Area Network (WAN) capable of providing the bandwidth necessary to facilitate global TV broadcasts, including online streaming of the event.
About the customer
Commsworld is a leading telecom network provider and ISP that manages and controls the largest privately funded optical core network in the UK. The ISP also offers a broad portfolio of cloud, security and voice solutions delivering accessibility to client applications and data across the world. With strong in-house service and support capabilities, Commsworld aims to be the provider of choice for digital connectivity solutions specializing in exceptional delivery to clients across all sectors.
Industry: Communication service provider
Location: Edinburgh, UK
Solution: Transponders and passive OADMs
Products: DCP-1610 transponder, OADMs
The challenge
Broadcasting the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships
The Union Cycliste Internationale (UCI) set the biggest ever cycling event in the world to date, the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships, in Scotland. To deliver a successful event, Commsworld was tasked with providing a Wide Area Network (WAN) capable of providing the bandwidth necessary to facilitate global TV broadcasts, including online streaming of the event.
Nick Ryce, Head of Network Operations, at Commsworld explains the significance and challenge of delivering connectivity for the 2023 UCI Cycling World Championships:
“This is not our first high-profile event, as we’ve done golf’s Open Championship, UEFA Euro 2020 and TRNSMT. But the UCI Cycling World Championships, combining indoor and outdoor cycling within a concentrated 11-day period, were the first of their kind on this scale. Since it was an inaugural event, we had no template to work from. Events were also spread out all over Scotland, including remote locations. With a crucial deadline, this required fast and creative networking solutions.”
“Delivering connectivity to the UCI Cycling World Championships was a high-stakes project and the fast, easy and high-performance deployment of Smartoptics was a key success factor.”
The Solution
Fast deployment of high-performance connectivity when it matters
Commsworld compared multiple optical networking vendors to partner with for the UCI events. One of the reasons Smartoptics was chosen is because the network elements could be deployed rapidly, ensuring the solution would be ready on time. Another key decision factor was the combination of strong performance and low latency. Smartoptics delivered transponders and OADMs for broadcasting 10G and 25G camera services from around the entire circuit in and around Glasgow, Scotland, back to the headend, enabling the events to be broadcast out into the world.
“With the event coming up rapidly, getting up and running quickly was decisive, and the ease of deployment of Smartoptics helped us meet our tight deadlines. The UCI wanted to be assured of high-quality and disruption-free broadcasts, and we felt confident in the robust performance of the Smartoptics network elements. Together with Smartoptics, we delivered scalable bandwidth to keep connectivity fast-flowing and reliable, resulting in reliable coverage, both on TV and online,” says Nick Ryce, Head of Network Operations, at Commsworld.
The Result
Flawless connectivity enables UCI broadcast watched by millions
With highly resilient connectivity of 10 gigabits provided to key venues in Glasgow, millions of people across the globe enjoyed live streams of more than 200 hours of cycling broadcast. More than 2000 athletes competed at the highly successful UCI Cycling World Championships and over 200 world champions were crowned.
“In total, 50 people from our team provided more than 2,000 hours of support, laid 45,000m of structure cable, more than 10km of fiber cable, 137 wireless access points, 36 switches, configured over 1,000 switch ports, and connected nearly 6,000 clients to WiFi. Along with the easy-to-use, high-performance equipment from Smartoptics, the result was 11 days of excellent and unrestricted coverage that contributed to the ships being one of the top 10 most watched sporting events in the world in 2023,” says Nick Ryce, Head of Network Operations, at Commsworld.
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