Orange gears up for the Tour de France but no mention of 5G

This weekend will see the Tour de France begin in Belgium and while it might be a chance for some to enjoy a tipple in the sun, for Orange it is a monstrous task. But it does seem to have forgotten to plug 5G.

Delivering a connectivity solution for this spectacle is somewhat of a difficult task. The race covers 3,460km over 21 stages, starting in Brussels, winding through 219 municipalities in France before ending in Paris. Four stages will be held in the Pyrenees and another four in the Alps, while numerous see the race snake through rural France. These are not necessarily the easiest environments to provide connectivity in.

The other factor you have to take into account is this is not necessarily a ‘build once’ concept for network infrastructure; the tour route changes every year, making permanent infrastructure redundant in numerous areas. That said, it does provide the commercial drive to bridge the digital divide in some rural environments.

In some places, it makes just as much commercial sense to rollout permanent infrastructure to the small towns as it does to make it temporary in the more secluded areas. This year, 11 locations will benefit from a permanent fibre installation, while 37 municipalities visited by the Tour and 182 municipalities located within 10km of race will also benefit from 4G upgrades.

This is not to say Orange should wait for the Tour de France to pass through a village to address the digital divide, but it is a nice by-product for some communities.

One massive omission from any of the materials is 5G. With 5G buzzing in almost every corner of the connectivity world, it would be a fair assumption it would be here as well. In other sponsorship properties Orange owns, Roland Garros for example, 5G has been the focal point of communications, but it has been missed out here.

Admittedly, this is a different and more complicated environment to deliver the super-fast ‘G’, but it does seem to an oversight; there are various different usecases which could be plugged by the telco here. This is not to say Orange should wait for the Tour de France to pass through a village to address the digital divide, but it is a nice by-product for some communities.

In 2017, we had a behind-the-scenes tour of the event, with Orange offering some insight into the efforts made to deliver connectivity. And its not as easy as it sounds. Alongside the Orange technical team which has to move with every stage of the tour, the telco has to provide connectivity for roughly 120 trucks housing various broadcasters, shifting 20km of fibre and 65km of power cables each day.

The figures quoted above were accurate two years ago, now you have to take into account consumers are more digitally defined, using a broader range of apps and digesting more data on a daily basis. Here’s a bit of a taste of the complications Orange faces this year:

In the ‘village’ at each stage of the Tour, Orange has said it will deploy eight separate wifi networks, with an equivalent rate of 200 Mbps and able to handle more than 10,000 simultaneous connections. This is the easy part, the village doesn’t move all day, but providing continuous connectivity while the race is progressing is a different challenge.

This is a marketing opportunity for Orange, it gets to show how wonderful it is at solving complicated problems, but there is certainly an upside for some in the rural communities who could see a connectivity boost. Assuming the race passes through your quaint village of course.