Analyzing mobile network experience at the Paris Olympics

Hardik Khatri & Simon Lumb 

The 2024 Summer Olympics were a celebration of sporting achievement, sportsmanship and togetherness — underpinned by awe-inspiringly complex planning and logistics. A key part of the preparations were those made by France’s mobile operators to cope with the demands the Games would place upon their networks. Following on from our analysis of the mobile experience at the opening ceremony — and now that the Games have concluded — we have analyzed how reliable our users’ experience was across the many Parisian venues and the surrounding areas.

We have focused on Reliability Experience, as download and upload speeds alone are a less accurate indicator of the true real-world user experience. Past a certain point, faster speeds have a limited effect, especially as users are more likely to notice the times when they struggled with no cellular signal than when they were able to download files extremely quickly. In our U.S. household survey, we found that reliability was more than twice as important to consumers as speed.

Key findings:

• Mobile networks held up. In general, mobile users observed little impact on their experience during the 2024 Summer Olympics Games — partly due to the large effort that went into preparing for the event. 
• Orange users’ Reliability Experience dipped during the Games. Our Orange users had the most reliable experience in the areas surrounding the Olympic venues over the 30-day period ending 18th July. However, Orange’s Reliability Experience fell by 10 points on a 100-1000 point scale during the period between the day of the opening ceremony and the end of the Games — putting Orange behind Bouygues. 
• This was due to increased packet loss. The root cause was increased packet loss in the areas surrounding the Olympic venues, focused on a number of hotspots, including around Château de Versailles and Stade Tour Eiffel in the seven days starting on 26th July (the day of the opening ceremony).
• This issue was resolved while the Games were still underway. The increase in packet loss seen by our Orange users was concentrated in the evening hours, beginning around 9 p.m. It first became visible in the seven days commencing 19th July. It reached its highest severity in the seven days starting 26th July but was largely resolved by the following seven-day period.
   

To assess how our users’ mobile experience was affected by the influx of spectators, athletes, and support staff during the Olympic Games, we analyzed the Reliability Experience in and around the event venues. Our analysis spanned from the opening ceremony to the conclusion of the Games, and we compared this period to both the seven days preceding the opening ceremony (including two days of preliminary competitions) and the 30-day period ending on 18th July.

Prior to the Olympics, Orange provided the most reliable experience, scoring an impressive 932 points on a 100-1000 point scale during the 30 days ending July 18th. However, during the Olympics, Orange's average score dropped to 922 points between the opening and closing ceremonies. In contrast, Bouygues saw its score rise from 923 to 931 points during the same period.

Unlike its rivals, Orange was the sole communications partner for the 2024 Summer Olympics. It said it would equip 15,000 Olympic and Paralympic athletes free of charge with its Orange Holiday eSIM 100GB 5G offer, in collaboration with Samsung, while also strengthening its points of sale for Orange Holiday SIM and eSIM cards. The event’s staff members, athlete teams, volunteers, health and safety, and security teams used a prioritized push-to-talk (PTT) over cellular service which ran over Orange’s 4G network. Orange made extensive preparations, such as the use of 50 temporary cell sites, a 100Gbps 60-site redundant IP network to handle the traffic between the event’s venues and a private 5G standalone network using dedicated spectrum for broadcasting.

Opensignal's Reliability Experience metric measures how consistently users can connect to and maintain a connection with their mobile network to successfully carry out typical activities such as streaming video or downloading files. This metric takes into account factors such as network availability, signal strength, data connectivity, task completion, and sufficiency.

In our previous analysis, we found that Reliability Experience worsened for our Orange users during the Olympics opening ceremony, while average packet loss increased. Packet loss, a key component of our Reliability Experience metric, is typically caused by network congestion and manifests as reduced communication quality (particularly for real-time applications), dropped calls and lower throughput.



We see a similar story across a longer time-scale when looking across the Olympic venues in Paris and their surroundings. The average packet loss observed by our Bouygues, Free Mobile and SFR users was relatively stable before, during and after the Games. However, our Orange users saw it spike in the hours of 9-10 p.m in the two seven-day periods ending 25th July and 1st August, hitting highs of around 5% and more than 7.5%, respectively. This issue had been largely resolved in the seven days ending 8th August and was entirely absent afterwards.
 

There are a number of areas where our Orange users were particularly affected. In the seven days starting on the day of the opening ceremony, these included those around some of the Olympic venues such as Château de Versailles, Stade Tour Eiffel, Hôtel de ville de Paris and Clichy-sous-Bois.

The above images can be viewed in a higher resolution here

Sticking the landing
France’s operators rose to the challenge posed to the Olympics and were able to provide users with a reliable experience. However, our Orange users saw a dip in their Reliability Experience before and after the opening ceremony, mainly driven by sharp increases in average packet loss around 9-10 p.m. Fortunately, the problem was nearly completely resolved by the seven days ending 8th August.

The fact that Orange was able to address this issue during the event highlights the importance of continuous monitoring during large scale events along with the need to have staff in place to make any required changes to network parameters.

Look out for future Opensignal insights on major events and our next mobile network experience report on France, which will be published later this year.