For the second year in a row, Nokia was present at the 2019 French Tennis Open, a.k.a. Roland Garros, to demonstrate what 5G will bring to the future of television. Even if we were not an official partner of the event, we partnered with Orange and France Télévisions to provide the 5G live system with two sites on-air in the stadium achieving the world's first live 8K TV broadcast over 5G. Orange deployed Nokia’s 5G multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) antennas, 4G (5G-NSA), and one Nokia AirScale base station with one AirFrame for the core and the edge cloud in the stadium using the 3.5 GHz test spectrum allocated by ARCEP, the French telecom regulator. 5G and 8K are disruptive technologies for broadcasting that will bring a TV revolution. Indeed, broadcasting digital content at a minimum of 50 frames per second with 33 million pixels will require a lot of bandwidth!
Already in July 2018, France Télévisions and Nokia Paris-Saclay teams demonstrated - in a live 5G environment on the NPS campus - that 5G was perfectly compatible with the requirements of 8K video transmission. After encoding and compression, the required 8K bandwidth for a video streaming is 100Mbs which is enabled by 5G smartphones today.
We achieved this worldwide first thanks to the huge contribution of Nokia Paris-Saclay teams who started working on this project two months ahead of the event and who ensured the whole show despite harsh weather during the tournament from May 20 – June 9. Orange GCBT operation led by Dominique Deprey; Patrick Blanc's Customer Solution’s team provided the 5G live system and ensured the technical support 7day/7 during this two week event with help from Lazhar Medfouni, Soukaina El Moussi, Raja Hasni, Pascal Durand, Michel Dilosquer, José Gomes Correia, Nicolas Bienvenu, Vincent Grognet, Priscille Cochois and others. François Fornier and Claire Raynal from NPS 5G&SC Productization; Catherine Huguenin, Audrey Yzerd who integrated the 8K use case on top of our 5G system and were 5G ambassadors to present the demo. Soizick Lamande and Gilbert Marciano managed the marketing and communication campaign on social media and in the press/TV with more than 40 articles/interviews and two press releases mentioning Nokia and tens of thousands of views in LinkedIn and Twitter.
In addition to Nokia teams, 20 technological partners were also involved in this demo including Oppo and Qualcomm for the 5G smartphone, Sharp for the camera and TV 8K, Intel for NAS, VLC for the video player, NEC Harmoniic for the encoding/compression…
Some key figures:
- 1,222 visitors
- 38 technotours
- 150 hours Live TV 8K
- 5.4 TB data transmitted on 5G to TV Stand Orange (+ 5.4 TB data transmitted on 5G to FTV TV stand).