our customers

Cellhire case studies

The customer - Action Images

Action Images is a market leader in Sports Photography. They boast an impressive portfolio of clientele including FIFA, UEFA, Coca-Cola, Barclays and Carlsberg as well as all of the UK's national newspapers. Following its acquisition in 2005 by Reuters, it now operates as the group's specialist sports arm, and offers truly comprehensive multi-media coverage of sporting events worldwide. Action Images also works as official photographers to a number of the country's leading sports teams.

The solution

Coverage is extremely important to Action Images who compete with journalists from around the globe for the perfect picture of sporting stars at crucial events. They need reliable, high speed data solutions for uploading images and data within very short timeframes.

With the use of the Cellhire's R-BGAN data phones, photographers John Sibley and Michael Regan were able to instantly upload photos from England's vital qualifying match against Russia in Moscow and send them back to London with minimal time delay, ensuring the pictures were fresh off the press the following day.

Cellhire's satellite equipment enables users to access email, corporate networks and the internet, transfer files and make telephone calls from anywhere in the world. BGAN offers significantly expanded bandwidth and capabilities compared with other mobile satellite services.

The quote

"At last night's England match Russian telecoms failed to fulfill any of the £20,000 plus worth of orders they took for ISDN lines. Even BBC Radio Five Live were forced to broadcast their match commentary via mobile phone for the first 15mins of the match, until they managed to locate a regular telephone line that they used for the remainder of the match. As expected the GPRS data network went down at half time and did not come back up on-line again until after the final whistle - and when it was working it was apparently very, very slow.

Satellite phones were the only reliable way of getting any data out of the stadium last night. We ended up using only one of the two R-BGANs, as the large roof of the stadium blocked the signal from one end of the pitch. However, at the other end of the pitch the signal was excellent and the connection fast and reliable for the duration of the match. We managed to send over 60 photos from the game, at speeds comparable to or faster than the Vodafone 3G networks in the UK."