Stress test: SailGP embraces real-time cloud workflows for Portsmouth event By Joe OHalloran Tuesday, August 12, 2025 - 10:15
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Emirates Great Britain SailGP Team helmed by Dylan Fletcher lead New Zealand SailGP Team helmed by Peter Burling as they sail pass the Grandstand on Race Day 2 of the Emirates Great Britain Sail Grand Prix in Portsmouth, Photo: Ricardo Pinto for SailGP
The saying goes that proper preparation prevents poor performance. Very true. And in the now rather infamous words of former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, there are known knowns, known unknowns and unknown unknowns. It's probably difficult to locate definitively the weather within any one of these categories. Especially in England during the summer.
For Warren Jones, chief technology officer of Sail GP, no matter how properly he prepares for each leg of his global nautical event, the weather on any race day is a massive unknown. And in the context of being in charge of a data and video network hurling around the high seas at high speed, ensuring the smooth running of a broadcast operation is not plain sailing.
The SailGP Championship describes itself as offering the most exciting racing on water with 10 teams on identical 50ft foiling catamarans slugging it out over two days with a total prize money of $12 million at stake. Events are hosted at 12 venues around the world, beginning in Dubai and then travelling to Sydney, Auckland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Portsmouth, Sassnitz in Germany, Taranto in Italy, Lake Geneva, C diz and then finishing in Abu Dhabi.
The competition claims to be at the forefront of technological innovation in sailing and also has ambitions to be the world's most sustainable and purpose-driven global sports and entertainment platform. Vessels can reach speeds of up to 100km an hour and each boat is equipped with a variety of sensors and other advanced systems including 4K video cameras. Every boat is also equipped with Cradlepoint edge routersfrom technology partner Ericsson which connect to a public and private 5G network on land with, in the case of Portsmouth, additional capacity served via a dedicated network slice on the public 5G Standalone network of UK operator BT.
In Portsmouth, the private 5G network covered operational and event sites, including a data centre located about 30km away from the event, built to offer secure, mobile, low-latency connections. Among the masses of data transmitted by the routers was 5G-enabled live camera streaming from competing F50s video streams, not only for broadcast purposes but also supporting SailGP umpires. For broadcast, the technical partners worked with Sony and its 5G live production products to trial new broadcast capabilities. Roaming Full HD cameras were set up to utilise network slices - optimised for the high-capacity uplink requirements of Sony's encoders - to support a SailGP production which is broadcast to 212 countries worldwide.
Read more AI, data, augmented graphics and more: SailGP embraces complexity as it prepares for Portsmouth debut
New to the UK event was a SailGP's 360-degree AR/VR capability, designed to allow fans in the dedicated fan zone to experience what it's like to be onboard an F50. This used new higher capacity 5G radios designed to enable ultra-low-latency performance and gigabit capacity.
Speaking just as the Portsmouth event was setting up, Jones described the challenges regarding video as being huge . He remarked: The boats are going at 60 miles an hour on the water, driven by wind. There's going to be so many challenges on it. We also manage over 40 live HD video feeds from onboard and chase boat cameras, with isolated feeds both recorded locally and streamed for broadcast. Live audio communications between athletes and umpires are captured and transmitted via IP-based intercom systems. Additionally, environmental data, including real-time wind and water conditions, is collected from a network of fixed and mobile sensors across the racecourse. Altogether, this ecosystem pushes tens of terabytes of data across the event weekend, powering both live broadcasts and advanced analytics.
Taking a cloud approach has been advantageous for broadcast. Jones notes that for previous years races he had to bring over 30 containers worth of equipment to each venue. Now that is down to one with cloud-based connectivity to a global broadcast centre in London with 120 people in working on feeds that go to 158 broadcasters around the world. SailGP generally manages around 58 million data requests during the event and needs AI for a variety of applications including automatically managing the set-up of the cameras.
Jones attributes the ability to perform these tasks mainly to the low latency of the Ericsson communications equipment. In order to have a meaningful quality broadcast this was just under 100 milliseconds but that in practice the company was experiencing delays in the region of 22 milliseconds.
Ericsson has given us time at the beginning and the end. My team doesn't have to be here a week before they could be here for two days. And it's an hour to pack up. The data is faster. We used to have three or four different [comms] routes because we couldn't have a dropped packet. On all technology, you get drop packets. Here? Bulletproof. It just works. We don't see a dropped packet within our system. We need the whole picture. The teams need to know what they've done and within every second, so having a dropped packet just doesn't work for us.
The shift to real-time cloud workflows has helped especially with remote production, but there's always a gap between theoretical load and what actually happens under race conditions
Interestingly the video is in HD and not 4K. Jones says the race doesn't need to
