An Optocore/BroaMan fibre network is at the heart of the new MEETT Toulouse Exhibition & Conference Centre – the third largest facility in France outside Paris). With a 40,000m2 modular exhibition hall, a main street that opens into an outdoor multipurpose area of 25,000m2, the fibre network handles sound, video, lighting and IT site-wide.
The installation was carried out by Optocore’s long-term French partner GB4D, in collaboration with the scenography company Ducks Scèno. Gilles Bouvard’s GB4D team worked alongside Grégory Aldéa, Head Of Audiovisual Projects at Ducks Scéno, on behalf of the MEETT consortium, Toulouse Métropole and GL Events.
‘We conducted a study of possible future equipment, both upstream and downstream of our network, as during the development phase we were not aware of the audiovisual equipment that would be installed; therefore we made a possible hypothesis based purely on the plans,’ Bouvard says.
MEETT is divided in three parallel bands, based around a row of modular exhibition halls. In its complete form the space is massive – 500m long and 80 to 100m wide.
The separate convention centre and multi-function event hall are split by a reception area and multi-storey car park. With such distances involved the use of a fibre network to transport all video, audio and data signals was obvious.
The Convention Centre’s 12 modular rooms are all equipped with fibre-optics, along with a large hall, in which another convention room can accommodate around 3,500 people (seated), while a second room can host exhibitions or other needs. At its maximum, the Convention Hall can hold around 7,000-8,000 people – showing the advantage of modularity.
Fibre-optic points are installed throughout the Convention Centre, and each modular meeting room is equipped with three quad fibre connection points.
For the management of these 12 rooms, a Seminar Rooms node has been equipped with a BroaMan Route66 Video Router (40-input/40-output), where 26/26 connect via CWDM multiplexer to fibre stageboxes in specific rooms, while 14/14 allow fibre video connections between routers in Seminar Rooms Node and Convention Room.
‘The CWDM video makes it possible to have two Video In and two Video Out per modular room,’ Bouvard explains. ‘The 14 optical strand-to-strand video streams allows full duplex in/out with the Convention Room node.’
The fibre points are cabled on single-mode quad fibres, dispatched to the router by a WDM frame. The latter is supplied from a manual fibre patch that supports 13 COM ports (combined main connections which carry all signals on a duplex fibre) to the router on the 39 available connection points (three per room).
In the Convention Room, network distribution is via 24 quad fibre connection points. In the Room Node a BroaMan Route66 Video Router (38-input/38-output) provides 24-input/24-output CWDM video for fibre stageboxes and the 14 full duplex SDI fibre video share streams with the Seminar Rooms node, with a WDM frame facilitating various connection points.
Each node is additionally equipped with an Optocore AutoRouter15 for the seminar rooms and an Optocore AutoRouter10 for the Convention Hall to complete the Optocore loop.
In order to function in all the different spaces, ten mobile racks have each been plugged with a BroaMan Mux22-IVT/Madi 4 SDI input/4 SDI output, with four Madi fibre ports for audio and Optocore X6R-TP-8MI/8LO (two ports of 16AES, four DMX RS422 port, LAN Base 10/100). Each rack can be connected by a quad fibre to any connection point in the building.
The Optocore and BroaMan backbones for fibre routing were necessary to avoid latency, according to Bouvard. ‘This fantastic system allows you to have any audio control surface in the network. Given its complexity, I challenge anyone to set up an Ethernet-based or IP network as easy and fast as ours to operate, without having to be a computer scientist.’
Sound reinforcement is an L Acoustics Kara system, while the installed mixing consoles are Soundcraft Vi1000s with Madi cards. All sound consoles can be connected to the network and most can control the 80 available Optocore preamps directly from the desk.
On completion, the GB4D team, Bouvard and Lund, undertook a thorough installation check, and provided full user training and installation monitoring. ‘The challenge today is to provide solutions to satisfy all user demands and transport different IP and Ethernet-based protocols,’ Bouvard reports. ‘Five years ago it was complicated, but thanks to BroaMan we now have the tools. Together we develop devices to easily transport and route data streams carrying different protocols, with no bandwidth limit.’
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