Why is the Tour de France such a difficult event to cover for Orange?
What makes the Tour difficult is first of all the fact that it moves all the time and the fact that communication is key for the people working on the Tour. That’s why we work a lot on the Tour preparation: I go on the roads of France as soon as October with the team in charge of sites to check essential details and to see the means we have to deploy on each site. With the Orange network we also have the possibility to work with our local resources, and we’re actually the only ones to do so. Obviously when we have to settle in places where there is nothing, like at the Mont Ventoux, it forces us to invent solutions. For example, we will have added mobile stations come for the penultimate stage on the uphill portion. They will allow the fans to be able to phone in places where they usually can’t. The evolution of the Tour format must also set out new difficult technical questions to sort out… More than the size of the Tour, it’s mainly the transformation of jobs and means that force us
