Connecting Miles: How Austria’s leading transport service provider brought together soccer fans
The Austrian Federal Railways (ÖBB) is Austria's largest transport services provider. ÖBB transports about 1.3 million passengers by train and bus to their destinations, daily. ÖBB Railjet is the transport provider’s ultra-modern high-speed train operating at speeds of 230 km/h. These high-speed trains are equipped with advanced on-board entertainment facilities including live streaming of ORF (Österreichischer Rundfunk), the Austrian Broadcasting Corporation’s programmes.
Streaming Soccer Live @ 230 km/h
During the UEFA Euro 2016 championship , OBB wanted to do something innovative – show live transmission of matches in the Railjet trains. They brought Nagarro on board for the conception and coordination of this flagship project. As the project partner, Nagarro's role involved developing scenarios and technical solutions for a stable and fail-safe reception, and to implement and test the solutions. ÖBB had launched a massive digital campaign around this and the public expectations were very high.read more...
Setting the course for innovation
The transmission of all relevant EM (European Championship) games live on the screens in the ÖBB Railjets presented the project team with the following challenges:
- Achieving high-quality mobile WLAN connectivity on trains running at a speed of 230 km/h.
- Providing high performance while handling ambient issues such as fluctuations in reception due to tunnels and train insulation or roaming issues while traveling via the famous Deutsche Eck (German Corner).
- Managing industry based challenges related to maintenance and broadcasting rights.
- Ensuring a robust implementation to guarantee clarity of reception.
Configuring WLAN with maximum bandwidth
Nagarro developed a solution that ensured an uninterrupted and high-quality transmission of a total of 4000 in-game minutes. Some of the significant features of the final application included:
- Fail-safe transmission: The developers evaluated the optimal route, technical equipment including back-up locomotives in order to ensure failure-safety.
- Impeccable transmission quality: The requisite download capacity was ensured by bundling all available mobile operators and leveraging LTE technology.
- Seamless Wi-Fi roaming: The team was successful in providing seamless roaming solutions for uninterrupted service while travelling via the Deutsche Eck (German Corner).
- Close coordination: The team coordinated with ÖBB for quality checks during the entire course of the journey.
- Round the clock monitoring: The system was monitored 24/7 and the teams coordinated with the marketing team for insightful updates on ÖBB’s digital campaign.
Result
The partnership proved to be a roaring success. The entire project took just 16 weeks to go live – from ideation to implementation – at the end of which:
- high-quality transmission of a total of 4000 in-game minutes was delivered.
- uninterrupted WLAN connectivity was achieved while travelling at 230 km/h
“Nagarro has supported us tremendously during this project. It is easier to set up WLAN in a space shuttle than in a Railjet, since the former transports significantly less passengers and unlike the Railjet, it is connected to a land-side transmitting station.”
Christoph Schmutz, CIO, ÖBB Personenverkehr AG