From 12 to 18 June 2026, Évian-les-Bains became the centre of global attention as world leaders gathered for the G7 Summit, which meant that 5000 to 6000 participants came to the small town at Lake Geneva. For mobile network operators, such a high-stakes event comes with unusual pressure – users like politicians, journalists, security personnel etc. expect uninterrupted services to do their jobs.
That’s why, for this G7 Summit, a leading French Mobile Network Operator (MNO), once again turned to iBASIS to provide dedicated Special Event Management services, building on a partnership that already includes support for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
The Challenge: High Traffic, Zero Tolerance for Disruption
A G7 Summit brings together an unusual combination of pressures on a mobile network:
- A surge in roaming traffic across key European and global corridors, as international press and delegations arrive with foreign SIM cards.
- Higher signaling volumes, increasing the risk of congestion at exactly the moment when networks need to stay stable.
- A spike in support tickets, requiring a rapid, structured response rather than standard queue-based handling.
The Response: A Dedicated Operational Model
iBASIS built an event-specific operational model around three pillars: a dedicated NOC service, a special reporting cadence, and a dedicated incident desk.
A Dedicated NOC Service
For the duration of the Summit, iBASIS stood up a special desk with:
- A dedicated hotline number for direct, immediate access to senior operational teams
- 4-hourly customised traffic reports and statistics
- Special tagging of customer complaints for faster triage
- Dedicated, focused monitoring on identified top destinations and the roaming voice trunk
- A customised escalation matrix to ensure fast-track resolution and clear accountability
- Continuous traffic trend analysis across Diameter, GRX, and GTPc
- Arbor traffic monitoring to catch anomalies before they became incidents
Investing in Future-Ready Infrastructure
Reporting followed a strict cadence: every 4 hours, daily, and in a full summary at the end of the event. The end-of-event summary compared total voice traffic against the same period the previous year, tracked monthly GRX and Diameter transaction volumes since June 2025, logged the total number of voice and data tickets raised during the event, and documented any major outages together with the actions taken to resolve them.
A Dedicated Special Incident Desk
Underpinning all of this was 24/7 monitoring across voice, GRX, Diameter, and signaling platforms, which meant enhanced monitoring paired with structured reporting, so that nothing happened without visibility.
The Results: Stability Under Pressure
The numbers from the event speak to what proactive network management can deliver under real-world stress:
- +17.6% increase in GRX traffic year-over-year, absorbed without incident
- No packet loss observed during peak periods
- 99.9% Diameter signaling success rates maintained across major partners
- Consistent performance across key destinations including Spain, the UK, Portugal, Italy, and the US
- Full service continuity, with no major outage, no pending issues, no critical alarms detected, and 100% Service Availability.
- Stable network KPIs across both voice and signaling layers throughout the Summit
- 90% of tickets were resolved within 2 hours, with all service-affecting complaints resolved within 1.63 hours, demonstrating the effectiveness of the customised escalation matrix.
Just as importantly, MNO’s teams had continuous, actionable visibility into how the network was behaving as the event unfolded.
A Model for High-Stakes Events
The G7 Summit is exactly the kind of environment where connectivity risk and reputational risk are one and the same. A dropped call or a congested signaling path can mean missing the story.
This engagement demonstrates what iBASIS’ Special Event Management framework is built to do: combine network resilience, operational discipline, and customer-centric execution so that partners can focus on their mission.
Want to learn more about how iBASIS supports mission-critical connectivity for high-visibility events? Contact us to know more about our Special Event Management solution.