We covered about the Private 5G network in the Coronation of King Charles III and Camilla, the Queen Consort, as part of 'Mobile & Wireless Roundup #41' newsletter back in May 2023. Since then the companies involved have won awards, given presentations and published magazine articles and whitepapers.
To understand better what actually was being done and deployed, please see the short video below:
The conference paper from the Proceedings of the 2024 NAB Broadcast Engineering and Information Technology (BEIT) Conference, available here, provides the necessary technical details for those looking to understand the actual technology part.
Quoting an extract from the conclusion of the paper:
The use of private 5G networks for broadcast production has previously been investigated and reported, but the deployment of the largest standalone non-public network to support media contributions at such an international, high-profile and high demand density event was an ambitious and innovative collaborative effort. This industry-leading project, pioneered by the BBC, successfully delivered private 5G connectivity using shared spectrum in the n77 band to an international coalition of broadcasters, providing untethered freedom to roam The Mall and deliver high-definition video and radio contributions when the public mobile networks were saturated, and with no change to their workflow.
The private media contribution network provided over 1 Gbps of uncongested uplink capacity over seven network cells covering 1km of the procession route, from Buckingham Palace to Admiralty Arch. The network was used by over 60 devices from 20 international media outlets (including ABC, ARD, CBC, CBS, CNN, ITV, TV 2 and RTL) to deliver live news broadcast contributions. This was mainly 1080i and 1080p video streams, typically using H.265 compression at bitrates in the range 6–12 Mbps, but also included MiFi-type devices to enable radio contributions for BBC local and national stations. The UK spectrum regulator, Ofcom, approved the use of 80 MHz of spectrum in the upper n77 band under a shared access licence (SAL), and themselves commented,
The sharing of a single non-public network to support so many broadcasters and devices is considered innovative and very efficient use of radio spectrum. The network (which was the largest to date) received very positive feedback from broadcasters, who delivered live video and radio content that could not have otherwise been broadcast.
As well as facilitating the successful delivery of media contributions to viewers around the world, the private network also removed the broadcast media load from the public networks. Available resources were highly constrained, and these public resources could be used to best serve the crowds. This has potential benefits for availability should emergency assistance be required.
This highly successful trial of 5G standalone technology for large-scale broadcast production demonstrates a useful application of the SAL scheme developed by Ofcom, an initiative that has pioneered spectrum sharing in the UK and is influencing spectrum policy across Europe. However, the manual interventions required in the current licensing processes introduces significant delays. These may be workable for large events planned well in advance, but do not serve expedited temporary deployments. Solutions for automated shared spectrum access and real-time monitoring are being explored and would be desirable to facilitate day-to-day and ad hoc usage.
The following video from Radio TechCon 2023, but shared recently, has a nice short presentation on this topic and is embedded below:
BBC also has a good summary of the Private 5G network deployment here.
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