The technology that brought you the Tour de France

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Imagine installing connectivity for an office of over 1600 people from scratch, with everything from ISDN and voice lines to DSL and IP video conferencing. Now imagine doing it over and over again in a new location every day, sometimes in the middle of a city and sometimes on the top of a mountain, using WiMax and satellite connectivity because there isn't an exchange to plug in to.

The Tour de France is an endurance event, for the cyclists - and for the technical team setting up the finishing line for each stage and the telecoms infrastructure to connect the media reporting on the race. Hours before the riders set off each day, Orange's Temporary Solution Team are at work laying cables, positioning aerials and connecting voice, data and video lines. Two thousand people work in the arrival zone; project manager Henri Terreaux-Barjou, calls it "a little city, moving every day".

Making up the city are 100 trucks for TV and other media, three Orange trucks, three helicopters and one plane to relay images of the race in progress to the commentators - and 40 miles of electricity and network cables to connect them together. It takes two hours to set it all up, and two hours to tear it all down. That means the team gets to work as soon as the race finishes and the yellow jersey is awarded; they leave one site at 10pm, get up at 3.30 and start laying out the next day's arrival point at 4am, ready for the journalists to arrive at a leisurely 8am. 50 full-time technicians and 330 local staff per stage work in all weather; some days are baking hot but one year there was snow on the finish line and they had to move 12.5 miles downhill to avoid it.

What they build each day is an entire DSL infrastructure for voice, data and video. 150 SDSL lines run into DSLAMs connected to an ATM backbone; all of it trailing between the three Orange trucks and dozens of other trucks, huts and cabins, so the distribution boxes and cable connections are rugged and waterproof.

Setting up for the Grand Depart in London was one of the easiest stages. Not only is it flat, jokes Terreaux but "The Mall is straight and it has parking". It's also only just wide enough; the road is crammed with trucks and cabins, cables and aerials, and at intervals the Horseguards canter past in full panoply. For some stages the team has to set up on top of a mountain or in a forest. When they can't get both the 35-ton Orange trucks up the mountain or into the forest so they can run the cables between them they use WiMax instead. "We can't run cable across the road if it's in the way of the cyclists," explains Rik Robarts, solution manager for Orange Business Services. The WiMax is used to deliver DSL services over Wi-Fi, reaching 1km between the trucks. It's the distance rather than the bandwidth that needs the WiMax connection; "you have DSL services on the end which can be contended with bursty traffic" says Robarts, so there's no point in using more than 8Mbps between the trucks

There are 300 voice lines at the finish line, 100 for the 400 journalists in the trackside press room and another 100 at the starting line. The rest of the 1,500 lines are at seven intermediary points along the course and with the other 1,200 journalists in the remote press room; in London that's a boat-ride down the river at ExCel, sometimes it's as much as 28 miles away.

Every journalist needs a different mix of voice, ISDN, DSL and Wi-Fi; while there's a strict order to the desks in the mobile press room they have to be set up every day because the order is reversed if they're on the other side of the road. Only 50 radio and TV journalists fit into the interview van so there's an IP video link to the remote press office, which also has its own 8Mb/sec line and a 2Mb/sec line purely for the photographers (they also get one of the six Wi-Fi hotspots for uploading).

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