The first half of 2025 has been rather good for the internet of things (IoT), especially for those manufacturing IoT devices. A July study from Berg Insight noted that the IoT device market is growing strongly, forecasting that 6.4 billion IoT devices will be connected to cellular networks worldwide by 2029. The market has witnessed new technical standards, devices and evolving market complexities.
The complexity issue is generally a function of where and how IoT devices are deployed, and the fact that they come in all shapes and sizes and have to work in varying places to achieve the same end: providing “valuable” insights into their users’ deployments; helping to optimise operations; mitigating risks; making better business decisions; proactively addressing potential issues before they impact operations; and aiding strategic planning and decision-making.
Yet even if variety is the essence of IoT devices, not many are likely to be placed 28.5m high and asked to measure and transmit data at speeds of up to 100km an hour on the high seas. But for the Rolex SailGP Championship, this is exactly what they are meant to do to support the smooth running of a fast-growing and massively entertaining race event, which calls itself “the most exciting racing on water”.
Now in its fifth year, the competition is backed by Oracle founder Larry Ellison and features boats co-owned by Hollywood stars such as Hugh Jackman and Ryan Reynolds, crewed by Olympic sailing champions such as Ben Ainslie and Ellie Aldrdige. The 2025 edition of the competition – for which total prize money of $12m is at stake for the winner – takes place at 12 venues around the world, in Dubai, Sydney, Auckland, Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Portsmouth, Sassnitz, Taranto, Geneva, Cádiz and Abu Dhabi. In essence, the racing features 10 six-person teams with identical high-tech, high-speed 50ft foiling catamarans (F50) racing head-to-head at speeds reaching up to 100km an hour.
Innovating at speed
The event also has the ambition to be the world’s most sustainable and purpose-driven global sports and entertainment platform. Moreover, it claims to be at the forefront of technological innovation in sailing. The vessels themselves are incredible in form. The sails are adjustable according to weather conditions and, for 2025’s racing, can reach 28m in height.
When an F50 reaches a speed of 87km per hour, the seawater on the hydrofoils begins to boil in a process known as cavitation. Each F50 weighs approximately 3,000kg and each hydrofoil can withstand up to 7,000kg of pressure. When an F50 is at full power, the driver can add 1,200kg of downward force to help control the boat. By design, each boat can move at up to four times the natural wind speed, so it can go faster than its own energy source, and each boat is more energy efficient than a bicycle, which is itself 98% efficient.
There are six people – three men and three women – in each boat. Two grinders provide the horsepower of an F50 by turning the handles to allow the wing trimmers to set the wing sheet as effectively as possible. A flight controller is responsible for keeping the boat flying above the water, reducing drag and increasing speed. A wing trimmer is in charge of making precise adjustments to the wing and communicating the best sailing modes to the driver, who, at the back of the vessel, is in charge of deciding where to steer the F50 on the racecourse and articulating the race plan to the crew. Finally, there is a strategist, who is focused on the big picture strategy, observing competitors.
In addition, each boat is equipped with advanced systems that include 4K video cameras, IoT sensors and other onboard technologies. In January 2025, as it set out its plans for the year’s races, SailGP announced that it was teaming up with Ericsson to benefit from what it said would be “the fastest mobile connectivity possible”.
5G at sea
The deal with the comms tech provider sees teams and personnel provided with enterprise wireless services to support high-quality 5G connectivity, improving fan experiences and race operations. To support the split-second human responses and decisions, Ericsson said each team has access to the fastest connectivity possible under some of the most challenging physical conditions. Every boat is also equipped with Ericsson Cradlepoint edge routers, which connect to a public and private 5G network on land.
The comms and technology setup is designed to deliver instant, real-time data and statistical feedback, despite the high speeds over open waters. The real-time transport of extensive data between off- and on-shore teammates on boat speed, wind conditions and other factors allows real-time data analysis to maximise speed and efficiency by adjusting sail settings and boat trim. The immediate availability of data on race position, course layout and wind direction enables teams to make informed tactical decisions during races, such as choosing optimal sailing angles, deciding when to tack or jib, and strategising for mark roundings.
Additionally, the services give data to support SailGP umpires in adjudicating on race protocol through the enhanced capabilities of 5G-enabled live camera streaming from competing F50s, along with insights into team locations, tactics and strategy.
Big buckets of data
Speaking as his team got ready for event seven, in the historic English naval city of Portsmouth, Warren Jones, chief technology officer (CTO) at SailGP, described the challenges of dealing with data as huge. He sees the boats as effectively IoT devices that send huge amounts of information back and forth. In the context of the race and network topography, upload speeds are more important to Jones and his team than download speeds, for accessing telemetry data, communications data and video feeds.
“Across a typical race day, the SailGP tech ecosystem handles over 52 billion data requests, driven by F50s competing across up to four races. Each boat streams high-frequency telemetry – position, heading, pitch, yaw, foil height, and more – at 10Hz or higher. We also manage over 40 live HD video feeds from onboard and chase boat cameras, with isolated feeds both recorded locally and streamed for broadcast. Live audio communications between athletes and umpires are captured and transmitted via IP-based intercom systems.
“Additionally, environmental data, including real-time wind and water conditions, is collected from a network of fixed and mobile sensors across the racecourse. Altogether, this ecosystem pushes tens of terabytes of data across the event weekend, powering both live broadcasts and advanced analytics. We’re used to dealing with immense volumes, and we’ve tuned our pipeline over the last few seasons to accommodate peak demand, with 5G increasing the data throughput.”
Another key thing that Jones stresses is that SailGP is a totally IP-based outfit for general data and for camera feeds alike. “Everything needs to go from here to Oracle Cloud. And from the Oracle Cloud, we distribute within our technology bucket. We’ve got 10 buckets: we’ve got social media, we’ve got TV broadcast, we’ve got the teams, we’ve got the coaches; it just keeps going. All the sense checks of all the individuals a coach would want. Something that race HQ wants, [like to] monitor the health of the boats. They all need something different.”
The technical challenges to capture so much information at high speed during each race seem something akin to Formula 1. But there is a massive difference in this regard: with SailGP, all data and video generated and picked up by the boats is shared among teams, organisers and even spectators.
This is designed to help SailGP prevent any unfair advantages and promote fair competition. Data sharing and improved bandwidth are seen as enhancing the spectator experience by providing insights into the intricacies of sailing tactics and strategy, making races more engaging and understandable for viewers. “Everything is given to everyone,” confirms Jones. “We create one bit of data and then escalate it around to give it to everybody else.”
Everything in the cloud
Despite the 100km per hour speeds over open waters of varying conditions, Ericsson has guaranteed that the comms setup could deliver instant real-time data and statistical feedback. Moreover, in Portsmouth, SailGP offered a 360-degree augmented and virtual reality (AR/VR) capability to allow spectators in a dedicated fan zone to experience what it’s like to be onboard an F50, using new, higher-capacity 5G radios designed to enable ultra-low-latency performance and gigabit capacity.
For the Portsmouth event, SailGP struck a collaboration with UK telco BT Group to use 5G standalone (5G SA) network slicing capabilities to deliver critical connectivity to underpin the event’s operations and enhance fan experience. The private 5G network covered operational and event sites, linking to datacentres located locally on shore and about 30km away from the event, in nearby Southampton. These transported real-time data directly and securely to an Oracle Cloud server located just south of London via dedicated fibre links.
Being cloud-based is a key condition for the CTO. “When we started SailGP, I had a blank sheet of paper. So I said: ‘Cloud, cloud, cloud. No servers.’ Everything is fitting in the cloud. We have a great partner with Oracle, who helps us be able to do that. We have a core database in London, but when we’re in Sydney, we have edge servers. They have great databases there. Today, with all the boats on the water, we’ll send 58 billion data requests back to that database, and from that, we build out all the metrics. So we need a reliable conduit to get from point A to point B to be able to do that.”
The 5G comms setup in Portsmouth was designed to fail over on either the public network or a slice of the BT private 5G network in an area that is known as the “race box”. Previously, the race used 3GHz radio, public Wi-Fi and point-to-point comms. “I think the 5G part is so much easier than what it was before,” says Jones.
He also sees the private 5G Ericsson kit as a “complete game changer”, not just from a throughput perspective, but also in terms of logistics. After racing ended in Portsmouth on the Sunday, the boats and all the other equipment had to be on the road the following Tuesday to get to the next leg in Germany. This is now totally possible given the modularity of design of the comms equipment.
“I think the EP 5G equipment Ericsson has given us is unbelievable, and it’s in a [single] box,” he adds. “I was part of the Americas Cup with Team USA, and we had three containers’ worth of equipment that we used to ship around the world. We had to manage it and update it. And when you ship a container from Sydney to San Francisco, it’s not the same container when it gets to San Francisco. Now, we’ve got a little box we can wheel around, and it’s in air-conditioning.”
Speaking about network latency requirements, Jones said the minimum requirement for a meaningful quality broadcast is just under 100ms (milliseconds), but in practice, the company experiences delays in the region of 22ms. Taking a cloud approach has been advantageous for Jones in other ways, too. He recalls that for previous years’ races, he used to have to bring over 30 containers’ worth of broadcast equipment to each venue. That is now down to one.
With his team managing around 58 million data requests during each event, Jones needs artificial intelligence (AI) within the Oracle setup for a variety of applications, including automatically managing the setup of the sensors and cameras. He attributes the ability to do this mainly to the low latency of the Ericsson communications equipment.
“The data is faster. We used to have three or four different [comms] routes because we couldn’t have a dropped packet. On all technology, you get dropped packets. Here? Bulletproof. It just works. We don’t see a dropped packet within our system. We need the whole picture. The teams need to know what they’ve done and within every second, so having a dropped packet just doesn’t work for us.”
Tech challenges on race days
Before he faced the Portsmouth event, Jones noted that despite all of his setup, there is always a gap between theoretical load and what actually happens under race conditions. Broadly speaking, he said the demands on the network were in the region of what he was expecting, but the race threw up some challenging conditions.
“Our preparation process is built around expecting the unexpected, especially in the coastal venues we race in, where the weather can take a turn quickly. What caught us out slightly in Portsmouth was the increased load from augmented reality layers we were piloting for the broadcast team. That pushed some of our GPU [graphics processing unit] edge resources harder than we expected,” he reveals.
We usually simulate with test data or dry-run the rigs, but there’s no substitute for real field telemetry and video under the exact network strain of a race day Warren Jones, SailGP
“The biggest surprise in Portsmouth was the effect of urban interference on the mid-band 5G spectrum we rely on. The historic naval infrastructure is dense with metal structures and legacy RF sources, which can play havoc with signal propagation. We had some temporary blackspots around the Victory Basin that didn’t show up in our pre-race testing.”
And there were one or two key lessons to take forward. If he had his time again for the Portsmouth leg, Jones says his team could have done some things differently. “Looking back, I think we could’ve deployed an additional test day in situ with the full cloud production workflow. We usually simulate with test data or dry-run the rigs, but there’s no substitute for real field telemetry and video under the exact network strain of a race day. Also, I would’ve liked to stage an extra layer of onshore 5G fallback, particularly with Portsmouth’s tricky topography and infrastructure.”
That all said, Jones is very happy with the response of the technology. He regards the BT and Ericsson teams as having done “an amazing job” despite the challenging conditions. Moreover, the new IT and comms technology has proved to be good enough to reduce infrastructure going forward. “From next year, we’re going to start turning off some of our redundant things that we don’t need anymore,” he observes.
So, with eight race weekends now under his belt, including August’s inaugural SailGP in Germany in the Baltic Sea resort town of Sassnitz, it’s on to Saint Tropez next, famed for its fast and furious racing conditions. While Emirates GBR took the honours here last season, Quentin Delapierre’s Les Bleus will be looking to harness home support and top its SailGP racing speed record of 99.94km per hour set in Saint-Tropez. It looks like Jones is going to have his hands full again.
