The technology that brought you the Tour de France

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Below: Wi-Fi, WiMax and mobile phone antenna sprout from the roof of a truck behind the press box. There are two Wi-Fi hotspots for the technical area, with a third running as a backup. Everything you see where will be dissembled in the two hours after the last rider arrives and shipped off to Canterbury, Dunkerque, Marseilles, Foix, Cahors or wherever the next stage is, every day for three weeks.

Above: The trucks - and the cables that connect them together - stretch along the 200m length of the technical area. Orange supplies race footage and connectivity to TV trucks like this one. There are more than 1600 staff working in the technical area as well as nearly 400 Orange employees at each stage.

Only a few journalists get a position in the commentator's box at the finish line but each of them needs a different mix of connectivity; voice, ISDN, DSL, Wi-Fi, camera feeds all have to be configured for each desk every day. Even though the order of journalists stays the same, if the box is positioned on the other side of the road the next day they'll be sitting the other way round to keep key journalists closer to the finish line.

Space is so tight in the technical area that the interview studio only holds 50 journalists in person. The others can ask questions and see the winning cyclists over an IP video link from the remote press office - which was down the Thames at ExCel for the London stage. The video goes over the same network and satellite uplink as the rest of the site traffic.

The action isn't just at the finish line; the London stage is less than six miles but some are 186 miles long. Three helicopters with five cameras each follow the race to get the best footage, but they're not always in range of Orange's Tour network, so a relay plane picks up the signal from the helicopters and sends it on to an intermediate satellite station; that relays the images to the finish line. Digital radio links send the footage the last 25 miles to a dish on a crane; the video goes to the production buses for each TV station covering the race and the broadcast video goes out by the satellite uplink or the connection to the local exchange.

Inflatable podiums and signs make it faster to move to the next location. As far as the geography allows, the layout of the technical and press areas is the same every day; easier to lay everything out and easier for press, officials and the technical team to find their way around a cramped and crowded area.

It's not just professional journalists who need to get connected; enthusiastic spectators want to share the excitement and the results with friends, so Orange adds more capacity to the mobile phone network at the finish line as well as in the technical area. And when the race is over for the cyclists it's just the beginning for the Orange team, who spend two hours tearing down the site, ready to start again at dawn.

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