The French Operation Division of Orange selected Xirrus for the Tour de France because only Xirrus Wireless Arrays have the proven performance, scalability, and trust to deliver a wired-like experience wirelessly for the thousands of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and cameras, used during the 21-stage race to access and share real-time race statistics, standings, and media footage. Besides all the event organisers, the network supported 125 TV broadcasters, 2,300 journalists, 70 radio stations, and 450 newspapers transferring enormous amounts of media-rich files from the Tour’s Start Village, Timing Locations, Sprint Locations, Media Centers, and Finish Lines.
“Orange is focused on providing the Tour de France, NBC Sports, government dignitaries, and thousands of media professionals during the race with reliable, high-performance wireless connectivity. Xirrus makes it easy to support the thousands of devices, simultaneously transferring large amounts of video and photo files through a robust network that, due to the race, must be redeployed on a daily basis, across 21 cities, in extreme environments. The array-based platform is the most powerful and trusted solution we’ve tested, and very quick to set-up,” said Henri Terreaux, Events Projects Manager at the French Operation Division of Orange.
“We are proud to work with Orange Events to deliver world-class performance for a world-class event. The Tour de France is proving to be one of the most watched and followed competitions in the world, and with that comes the high use of mobile devices, including smartphones, iPads, and laptops, all with video capabilities. With over one hundred million Internet connections over the course of three weeks, the Xirrus array-based architecture has been tested and proven again to be the leader in delivering wireless for BYOD. BYOD is about performance – speed and density. We’ve integrated multiple modular access points with an expandable chassis so organisations can get more coverage, capacity, and bandwidth than any other offering. Powerful. Simple. Trusted wireless access,” said Sean Larner, VP international sales at Xirrus.