Representative deployment — an illustrative composite of real deployment patterns.
Situation
A regional sports network produces ~60 live away-game broadcasts a season across
college basketball, baseball, and football — mid-size arenas and stadiums, many
with no usable house circuit for contribution. Every game meant either an SNG
truck roll or a rented venue circuit, and the aging truck was due for replacement.
The old-way cost
- Truck-served games (40/yr): $6,200 average all-in per game (truck day, operator,
fuel, $300–$600/hr space segment) → $248,000/year - Venue-circuit games (20/yr): $7,500 average per event → $150,000/year
- Pending capex: SNG truck replacement quoted at $520,000
- Setup: 90+ minutes per game; two extra crew per truck game
- Status-quo run rate: ~$398,000/year + a half-million-dollar truck decision
The solution
West Networks built two identical REMO field kits, flight-cased and on-air-ready:
- 2× Peplink HD4 MBX
— quad 5G, one modem per carrier (four carriers, pre-activated pooled SIMs) - 2× Starlink Enterprise Kit
— the crowd-proof path for packed arenas - SpeedFusion
bonding with WAN smoothing on the program and comms streams; hot failover across
all five paths per kit - Per-application steering: contribution feeds duplicated across the two healthiest
paths; crew Wi-Fi rides the remainder
Hardware + service, both kits: ~$41,000 one-time + ~$3,000/yr SpeedFusion +
~$15,000/yr data (60 games × ~$250).
Results
- On-air from arrival in 12 minutes average (previous truck line-up: 90+ min)
- 60 games produced REMO-style; on-site crew cut from 9 to 4 per game
- 147 carrier degradation events across the season logged by SpeedFusion — zero
visible on air (hot failover + smoothing absorbed all of them) - Aggregate uplink per site: 140–280 Mbps measured; program feeds ran 2× 4K HEVC
- Year-one connectivity spend: ~$59,000 vs ~$398,000 → $339,000 saved (85%)
- The $520,000 truck replacement was cancelled; the remaining truck was re-tasked
to the two mandated-satellite events on the calendar - Payback on the full two-kit investment: inside the first 7 games
Pull-quote for site: “We stopped budgeting connectivity per game. The kit is
just… part of the camera package now.” — Director of Engineering (composite)