Adoption of railway telecommunications technologies boosting regional rail – Huawei

The adoption of modern railway telecommunications systems is boosting the efficiencies of railways in the Southern African region, says Huawei Global Transport Solutions business development director Norman Frisch.

The use of well-established GSM-R (GSM for railway) systems, as well as versatile long-term evolution (LTE) systems, is providing standardised yet customisable solutions to the various challenges facing the railways sector in the region.

A specific aspect is to reduce trackside equipment, which is vulnerable to theft and damage. This was achieved by deploying GSM-R and transmission equipment that was fixed to the tops of masts and linked to the control centre by microwave transmission, reducing the need to lay fibre-optic cables along the railway lines.

The microwave transmission system is used for mission-critical communication, but can also transmit broadband data from closed-circuit video surveillance systems.

The GSM-R system, based on the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), of a rail operator in Zambia carries mission-critical voice and train signalling data in a single digital wireless railway system.

The system also enables railways to consolidate their physical command and control centre infrastructure, including legacy information and communication technology systems into a cloud-based solution, which improves the integrity of the network and critical communications.

This consolidated system, called the Huawei Fusion Operations Control Centre solution, uses virtual machines to ensure that all the hardware and communications protocols run in concert with one another and make the data from all systems of the rail operator available to all other functions and divisions of the firm.

The virtualisation allows rail operators to improve overall availability of operation and control centre functions through geographically redundant backup systems, while reducing the costs of their critical communications and systems, adds Frisch.

Safety, reliability and interoperability are crucial for rail operations, such as rail transport, and the GSM-R and LTE systems used for rail have been standardised for broadband and voice trunking from the trackside and on board the train.

LTE systems are more resource efficient than the usual GSM-R systems, though the exact format a rail network will take will be informed by its existing infrastructure and how to most efficiently augment it.

“Southern Africa has deployed GSM-R technology, similar to Europe and the Middle East, but all these regions are also keenly aware of the benefits that LTE systems bring. In Germany, the new network equipment is dual-mode capable and the LTE system can be activated when the operator deems it necessary. The LTE systems deployed in Zambia, Kenya and South Africa and the Middle East are also LTE-GSM-R dual-mode capable.”

Further, while declining to name the company and country, Frisch notes that a rail operator client in Southern Africa would improve cargo or passenger capacity on the company’s network by using an end-to-end ERTMS GSM-R system to schedule trains more effectively.

Technology solutions can help to overcome various aspects of Africa’s rail infrastructure challenges, and, at the very least, can help to make companies more efficient and profitable, which should improve their ability to build more infrastructure in future, concludes Frisch.