Just cat5e that's interesting. Good insight tooAs I said earlier, all the cables were sourced locally...unfortunately Cairns doesn't have an unlimited supply of outside broadcast TV cable...we are only a few thousand metres short...
Just to give you some idea, I laid the timing cables for the DH... With a couple of helpers, we laid 3 lines to intermediate 2, two lines to intermediate 1 and one line to the start, it was 4200m of cable... Yes 4.2 kms...dragged up the hill and laid by hand. It was cat 5e cable...you know your standard blue computer cable, not the 20mm fat orange tv cable. The timing cables took almost 2 days to lay.
Now you want 10 cameras on the course in an inaccessible rain forest, and not a ski field where you can branch out off the chair lift. The longest runs will be over 1 km. Ever seen a 1km roll of tv cable? I only saw the guys joining rolls on reels that took 2guys to lift - maybe a couple of hundred metres per roll. How do you get that up the track in the conditions we had? There in no ATV access...it's all got to be done by hand.
I am only relaying what the tv guys I was working with said to me...the venue supplies the cable otherwise they'd be hauling shipping containers of the stuff around the globe.
As was mentioned and seen on TV the weather and possibly the spectators using the cables to climb up/down the mountain played havoc with their feeds.
We will ALL know better for next time.
What is the deal with going wireless, what are the restrictions in cairns or for technology for that, is it primarily a interference issue or is it also a speed and stream issue? Are there other ways without lugging 20kms of cable up a hill?
If there are other options I'm guessing that money is the limiting factor in that case.