Formula 1® (F1) racing is the world’s most prestigious motor racing competition, as well as the world’s most popular annual sporting series.

Formula 1 followers are all around the world and in today’s interconnected world, they all want to experience the competition in real time. This means they do not want to lose sight of their preferred team, whether they are on the track or in an emergency pit stop. A single-second image freeze can mean missing a defining moment in the battle on the track. 

Batelco and GCX provide high-performance connectivity to Formula 1 viewers

Batelco, the leading telecom services provider in Bahrain and part of the Beyon Group of Companies, was the provider for the 2023 Formula 1 Bahrain Grand Prix event transmissions. Batelco utilized, as part of its solution, Global Cloud Xchange (GCX) to provide a resilient, stable, high-performance service with priority responsiveness and a solution featuring high-touch customer support. 

GCX expedited the delivery of the international links to Europe, controlling and maintaining latency, and the jitter and packet losses on long-distance service. GCX assembled a dedicated task force to build the services on an almost 12,000+ Kilometres long route running on subsea and terrestrial protected fibres, and delivered them while keeping international standard SNCP switching to 50ms. GCX’s technical team engaged with Batelco to fine-tune the network-to-network interface configuration. 

To achieve the outcomes and goals of the event, GCX created customized processes to maintain uptime requirements of the services, managing the network during the event. 

A focused team was assigned to work around the clock, taking any necessary corrective actions to ensure full-service availability, and informing customers in advance about any possible transient service disruption. GCX field teams remained on call with emergency spares, ready to immediately act in case any problem was observed. 

GCX’s technical team kept constant communication with customers from before the delivery of  services until the end of the event. 

GCX’s adaptability and agility have been hugely appreciated by Batelco and have set the benchmark for their partnership on other critical events and next year’s F1 competition. With excellent teamwork with Batelco, it became possible to deliver the event transmissions with ZERO incidents.