More than 5 billion people watched the Football World Cup 2022: The live matches and reports reached TV screens via fibre optic connections set up and operated by VIDI, a German service provider in the field of broadcasting and telecommunications technology.
The global fibre optic network connected the IBC International Broadcast Centre in Doha, Qatar, with broadcasters, media companies and telecommunications companies all over the world. The transmissions reached the rights holders via hubs in Frankfurt, London and Singapore.
All 64 World Cup matches in HD and Ultra HD (UHD) quality, match reports, interviews, reporter footage and other material were distributed via the fully redundant network, which had a total bandwidth of 1 terabyte. In total, hundreds of petabytes of data were transferred to the recipients during the tournament.
A multi-level security system protected the broadcasters from signal outages. The redundancy concept included disjunctive routing, supplementary emergency lines and automatic and coordinated emergency switching options based on the VIDI NMS (Network Management System). The network was operated from a NOC (Network Operations Centre) set up for the event in Doha and a backup NOC in Darmstadt. All equipment was consistently redundant.
“Setting up a worldwide fibre optic network for live TV from the sporting event of the year poses numerous challenges, such as the homogeneous management of hardware from a wide range of manufacturers, distributed over several continents, as well as maximum protection against signal losses,” said Karsten Winterberg, Managing Director of VIDI. “With our many years of experience, we were able to guarantee quality, stability and security. This paid off when, among other issues, there was a major submarine cable failure during the World Cup, which we were able to completely absorb through our redundancies and backup paths.”