Pope Leo XIV in Metz: Mediactive deploys the international press centre network

Pope Leo XIV’s visit to the Centre des Congrès Robert Schuman in Metz on 28 September 2026 put the city in the global media spotlight.

The event combined an interfaith meeting with a conference on peace and European unity, attended by the official Vatican News and Vatican Media teams. It brought together more than 300 accredited journalists and media professionals, whose transmission and upload traffic ran entirely on the network Mediactive deployed on site.

Mediactive provides managed network services for Clameurs, a venue equipped with OPENevents solutions. For the papal visit, Mediactive deployed a new network dedicated to the press centre and connected it to the venue’s permanent infrastructure. It also strengthened its on-site teams and set up event-specific monitoring.

At an event of this kind, the network is how every media outlet files its reports, uploads its content and stays connected to its newsroom. Signal reliability during the interfaith meeting and the conference directly determines the quality and completeness of the coverage produced by newsrooms around the world.

An exceptional media context with critical network demands

Hall 1 of the Centre des Congrès Robert Schuman housed two press areas with different usage profiles. The POPE Media Centerhosted most of the accredited journalists. Their work centred on heavy photo and video uploads and a continuous flow of reports to their newsrooms. TheVAMP Media Center, reserved for the Vatican News and Vatican Media teams, handled broadcast production traffic with particularly high bandwidth requirements.

Running two environments with different needs at the same venue raised a specific architecture challenge. Each area’s traffic had to be kept isolated while performance stayed consistent across all of Hall 1. Mediactive’s teams planned this segmentation in advance, which meant the load could be absorbed without any last-minute trade-offs between the two areas.

The most sensitive moment was the interfaith meeting in the early afternoon. That was exactly when media teams most needed a stable network to publish in step with the event. The network deployed by Mediactive handled this surge without any loss of performance.

OPENevents solutions: network infrastructure built for international media

Mediactive deployed a combined wired and Wi-Fi infrastructureover three days covering set-up, the event itself and breakdown. It ran alongside the venue’s permanent infrastructure and was connected to it. Mediactive’s teams, reinforced for the occasion, provided continuous on-site supervision. This on-the-ground presence is central to the deployment:at an international press centre, the ability to identify and fix an incident within minutes matters as much as the quality of the initial architecture.

Mediactive: the network operator for high-profile institutional events

Acting as network operator for an international press centre requires expertise that goes well beyond installing equipment. For Pope Leo XIV’s visit to Metz, Mediactive handled the entire technical chain. It deployed a new network connected to the permanent infrastructure of Clameurs, which it already manages. It reinforced its on-site teams and ran dedicated monitoring on the day. It was this combination of an architecture designed for the demands of an international press environment and an on-site team able to handle the unexpected that kept the connection reliable for the whole event.

With its OPENevents solutions, Mediactive gives organisers of high-profile institutional events an end-to-end offering. It sizes infrastructure for high-density environments, segments traffic precisely between clients and provides continuous supervision. Together, these deliver the responsiveness needed during the most critical editorial moments. The papal visit to Metz is a concrete example.