A bonded mobile connection for a live satellite interview at Stirling Castle
The situation
On 16 March 2018, Souter Investments hosted a corporate event at Stirling Castle: an audience with Sir Richard Branson, built around a private interview and question and answer session in front of an invited audience. It was hosted by Sir Brian Souter, the founder of Stagecoach and of Souter Investments, whose long business relationship with Sir Richard was the subject of the interview.
Sir Richard was not going to be there. He was at his residence in Morocco, and he was joining live, on a video link.
MCL Create were producing the event and brought Fuse in to provide the connection that link would run on.
What was at stake
Stirling Castle is a fortress. Its walls were built to withstand attack, and stone of that thickness is just as effective against a radio signal as it was against everything else it was designed to stop. There was no usable connectivity to build on, and nothing about the building could be altered to help.
The event gave no room for recovery either. A live two way interview happens once, at a set time, in front of an audience who have come specifically for it. If the link dropped while the two principals were speaking, there was no way to go back and try again, and the failure would have been watched by every person in the room.
What Fuse did
- Bonded three mobile connections into one. Rather than relying on a single network and hoping, a triple bonded router was deployed with external aerials, carrying an O2 SIM, a Vodafone SIM and an EE SIM. Bonding combines the connections into one aggregated link rather than simply switching between them, which meant more capacity for a live video feed and no single carrier holding up the broadcast. The aerials were positioned to get a usable signal in spite of the stone rather than through it.
- Put a completely separate router behind it. A second, independent router on its own SIM was deployed as backup. Not another SIM in the same device, a different device entirely, so a hardware fault was as survivable as a network one.
- Installed the day before, and stayed for the event. A Fuse engineer delivered and installed on 15 March 2018, the day ahead of the event, so the connection was built and tested before anyone arrived. The engineer remained on site through the event itself providing live technical support, then recovered the whole system afterwards.
The result
The link held. Sir Richard Branson joined live from Morocco, spoke with Sir Brian Souter in front of the room, and the interview and question and answer session ran as planned. The audience at Stirling Castle got the event they had come for.
The point
The hardest connectivity problems are rarely the newest buildings. They are the oldest ones, where the construction that has kept the weather and everything else out for centuries does exactly the same to a signal, and where nothing can be drilled, routed or altered to make it easier.
The answer is not a bigger connection. It is more than one, combined, with a separate system behind it and an engineer who installed it the day before and is still standing there when it matters. None of that is visible to an audience, which is the point. Nobody in the room should ever know how close a live link is to being a problem.
Check any UK commercial address free at connect.fusecore.co.uk.