Telstra Helps Australia's National Rugby League Take Over Vegas To Start 2025 Season Connectivity was key for the mostly remote production spanning the Pacific By Ken Kerschbaumer, Editorial Director Friday, April 4, 2025 - 7:00 am
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The Australian National Rugby League began its season at Rugby League Las Vegas, a four-game event at Allegiant Stadium in late February, part of an effort by the league (which is not Rugby Union, the version of rugby more commonly known around the world) to grow its international presence. For Telstra, title sponsor of the competition, this year's event also kicked off the telecommunications-service provider's 10th season supplying connectivity services from NRL stadiums (as well as for this event) to the NRL Bunker in Sydney where NRL officials review plays, penalties, injuries, and more.
Delivering connectivity to the NRL Bunker for 10 years is a fantastic milestone for Telstra, says Steve Dargham, head of business development, major events, Telstra. Today, almost every single [NRL] stadium is equipped with a 100-Gbps circuit, plus a backup, and they are available as a bookable service. We also have a support line in case the NRL needs assistance, but I can't remember anyone having to call us in the past 10 years.
Telstra's Steve Dargham with the flypack that transported camera signals from Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas to the NRL Bunker in Sydney.
The NRL Bunker features 57 monitors and is connected to the venues via venue kits, which include a total of 20 racks of servers across both the NRL and the kits. Twenty HD feeds are fed to the bunker from each stadium, with =signals from the usual hard camera positions, Spidercam, drones, and other cameras involved in the production.
All of those cameras go through the outside-broadcast truck and to the bunker but also to multiple destinations if needed, like FOX Sports or other media outlets, adds Dargham.
NRL matches are mostly produced remotely out of the NEP Andrews Hub in Sydney, and Telstra provides that connectivity as well. Outside-broadcast trucks from NEP, he says, can come in, plug into our port, and get the signals to the destination required through our booking system.
Transporting the signals across Australia involves multiple Telstra fiber services and nodes, beginning with nodes in five Territory capital cities: Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, and Adelaide. Built-in diversity ensures that the signals get to the nearest capital-city multimedia node and switching center. From there, the signals travel on Telstra's high-speed backhaul network, which is fully protected and redundant, to Sydney, where they connect to the required inter-capital fiber ring. A Global Operation Center in Melbourne, operational since the 2000 Sydney Olympic Games, monitors all signals and traffic within Australia, as well as sea cables for international connectivity.
No matter what stadium you are at, Dargham explains, you will be connected to the end destination, whether it's a broadcaster or a production hub facility.
For the NRL Las Vegas event, typical NRL Bunker operations spanned the Pacific. FOX Sports Australia once again produced the match and studio-show coverage out of NEP Supershooter 4 instead of relying on a production team at the NEP Andrews Hub. Rightsholders in Australia were able to use Telstra to access either UHD signals or HD services, as well as multiple return paths and Layer 2 Ethernet services. Hawk-Eye powers the Bunker video review operations, which rely on the HD feeds. FOX Sports used the UHD versions of each camera signal to produce the show in true 4K and deliver it to viewers back home, who are among the few sports fans around the world who can watch a true-4K production.
Roundtrip delay for the officiating has to be as low as possible, and, to help ensure that, Telstra built a core network for the Las Vegas matches.
We have four or five sub-sea cables so that we can also always use the cable with the lowest delay, says Dargham. The lowest delay from the U.S. to Sydney, roundtrip, is around 134 ms, ensuring that the officials in Sydney can make decisions and communicate with officials at Allegiant Stadium in near real time.
We have two full 1-Gbps circuits connecting Las Vegas to Sydney as they need all of the camera feeds to make the best decisions, adds Dargham. If there is an issue with one cable, there is an automatic failover, and, in that case, the delay might go up to 157 ms. We also have a disaster-recovery route with roundtrip delays of around 173 ms. Either way, the decisions can get made very quickly.
After 10 years of supporting the NRL's remote production and Bunker production efforts, the relationship with the NRL, and its broadcast-production partners, remains strong, he says. I do have to give credit to those pioneering broadcasters who came to us and said they wanted to do this type of remote production. At the time, it was pioneering work, but, with our knowledge in networking and connectivity, we deployed the network, and we've never looked back.
Key to the relationship is that Telstra does not require the NRL (or any other client) to do things like pay for a full year of circuit access even though the circuit is needed for only one day, a common complaint against some traditional telco providers.
We understand the media-broadcast industry, Dargham notes. We're considerate and more flexible. We provide them with premium reliable network connectivity between the stadium and their destination, and, at the same time, we can also provide disaster recovery via satellite or alternate methods.
With cloud-based production increasingly relying on that infrastructure, for not only production but distribution, Dargham says, Telstra is ready.
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