Festival goers who braved the crowds atGlastonburycan thank Orange's portable basestations for giving them the
opportunity to tell friends where to find them in the
throng.
Orange used the latest mobile digital technology to meet
festival-goers' growing desire to send video and sound clips from
their mobile phones to friends and family.
This was Orange's 10th year supplying mobile coverage to the 900
acre site, said Tim Smith, Orange's director for network design and
delivery. Smith said the now-honed operation was equivalent to
supplying a town the size and population of Norwich with saturation
mobile telephony within a week.
To carry calls from around 150,000 people per day, Orange
deployed five mobile base stations that delivered 2G and 3G mobile
services. The 2G service allowed up to 2,700 simultaneous
conversations, while the 3G service provided bandwidth of 7.2Mbps
using a combination of
HSPDA
and
HSPUA
high-speed network access and uplink protocols respectively. To
increase the network's capacity further, Orange used a technique
called half-rate
coding, which doubles the number of possible simultanenous
conversations at the expense of audio quality.
A single 3G user could have direct access to about 6Mbps, but in
practice users received around 1Mbps, Smith said. This provided
enough capacity for music lovers to send digital messages, pictures
and sound clips from the gigs to friends elsewhere.
Smith said spectrum management on the site was especially tricky
because it had to fit in with the surrounding ambient coverage as
well as respond to changing demand patterns as the crowd moved
around.
Orange had a team on duty around the clock to tune the network
to ensure that callers had an optimum service without interfering
with surrounding coverage.
Smith said Orange had bought a national licence to 32Mbytes of
microwave spectrum earlier this year. This allowed it to set up
direct links back to its core network. "This made it much easier to
provide a fast reliable service without interfering with local
coverage," he said.
Orange was using this spectrum to service other music festivals
and events. It could also deploy it to help provide fast mobile
coverage to large scale emergencies, Smith said.
"Glastonbury and other music festivals such as V and the Isle of
Wight have given us a good understanding of what it takes to
provide fast temporary coverage to relatively large areas," Smith
said.