Pico Station

MPLS SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION
Despite Volvo Ocean Race’s request for live streaming, previous
ports were not able to provide real-time streaming of the
in‑port races; they had to record the races and stream hours
later. Miami would be a different story.
Sling Broadband used a variety of Ubiquiti products to support
the Volvo Ocean Race:

•  Rocket radios paired with RocketDish™ or Sector Antennas

•  NanoBridge® and NanoStation® devices

•  PowerBridge® devices

• PicoStation® devices

Racing coverage required a Point-to-Point (PtP) link with
two segments:

• A helicopter flying over the ocean to the top of a building

(the building was set up to auto-track the helicopter)
§§ The building top to a central location, where the video was
encoded and then streamed live
To live stream the entire in-port race, Sling Broadband set
up an MPLS circuit on top of two Rockets. One challenge of
Ethernet over MPLS (EoMPLS) was that the MTU was not large
enough; there were problems with packet fragmentation.
Sling Broadband used Ubiquiti’s airOS to increase the MTU size,
preventing packet fragmentation, latency, and jitter. The end
result of this complex, technically challenging endeavor was
success: Sling Broadband pushed more than 60 megabits per
second of multicast traffic with 802.1Q encapsulation over an