London, November 2008. I was fortunate enough to be invited to give a keynote at a very interesting rail-communications conference recently.

Graham Wilde and Ross Parsons from UK-based BWCS Consultancy have expanded their hugely successful annual Mobility@Rail summer conference in London with a new autumn-edition, focusing upon rail communications regulation and management.

Admittedly the first in a series of many to come, the speakers at this introductory event focused mainly upon Europe’s regulatory success in dealing with interstate rail-communications, a system also known as “GSM-R” (”R” stands for “rail”).

Orchestrated by the European Union, supported by large vendor-consortia (the likes of Nokia-Siemens and Nortel), and now implemented by the majority of European rail-operators, the GSM-R system has proven to support critical “below-the-rail” secure voice communication systems at Europe’s densely interstate rail network.

However, despite its major success, the various presentations from both train- and rail-operators clearly indicated the need to further expand the GSM-R system to increase its capacity for wireless data-communications, to increase security on the trains and the trackside as well as to support a range of operational and maintenance (remote-diagnosis) applications.

Train operators certainly know what they’re talking about, as over the last 6 years quite a number of train-operators across Europe have build ‘connected train’ networks to support applications like real-time internet-browsing, but increasingly also to support real-time video-surveillance systems.

And in a world where public rail transport is widely and increasingly being adopted as a “green” solution against CO2 pollution from alternative (car- and plane) modes of transportation, this need for a ‘connected rail’ solution is as real as its gets.

Unfortunately, GSM-R finds itself here a victim of its own success. By having adopted designated radio-spectrum in the popular GSM-band to support secure rail-comms, by definition GSM-R is unable to expand into more high-bandwidth applications. And although GSM-R can be upgraded to include some data-capability, basically we’re talking here about ‘SMS’-type data capabilities.

Unfortunately the GSM-R vendors are unable to provide any solace (yet). Stuck between their commercial interests to resell the GSM-R solution outside Europe’s borders (especially eyeing the booming Asian rail-market), and the inherent bandwidth limitations that the GSM-R frequencies offer, their proposed solution is as straightforward as it is profitable: Why not invest several tens of billions of euro’s in building new separate physical communication networks along the tracks to support the various high-bandwidth needs of “below” and “above” the rail applications?

The reality of today’s train-operations, especially in Europe, is summed up by two words: corporatization and privatization. And to give the vendors, no matter how organized their consortia and sophisticated their marketing, a new carte blanche to spend billions of euro’s on an additional wireless track networks, might not be in the best of Europeans tax-payers interest…

As an industry outsider focusing upon wireless innovation, I myself would have expected the GSM-R vendors to come up with a more integrated communication roadmap themselves, up-selling new advanced solutions to its already established GSM-R customer base. However it seems they are not under a lot of pressure to do so.

Norman Frisch from Nortel, faced these challenges in his presentation. He pointed out that although Nortel is moving towards IP-enabling the GSM-R solution, the European Railway Association only expects that by 2017 (!) the vendors should be able to replace the current circuit-switched GSM-R technology with a packed-switched GSM-R solution (supporting IP-packets). Mind you, spending ten years improving a limited wireless rail solution amounts to several generations of investing in new improved next generation wireless rail technologies! He rightly mentioned that as the current GSM-R solution is only halfway being deployed across Europe, it would not make commercial sense to point out upgraded or even alternative solutions…

What is clear is that when it comes to the future of rail-comms, “Europe” has adopted the evolutionary track.

Interestingly enough, two speakers from the USA provided more ‘revolutionary’ directions. Faced with stringent public transport budgets, very mature wireless technology industry, and a severe fragmented industry, several trials offer an indication of how the various rail-operator needs can be integrated into a cost-effective common wireless architecture solution, using more advanced wireless technologies, focusing more upon IP-standards.

Steven Rayment, CTO from BelAir Networks, a WiFi-mesh-vendor, presented a highly interesting case study of a USA-based public transit system operator where its patented wifi-mesh technology has been used to support a train-operators need for public access, public safety and train operations. Unfortunately the train-operator itself was not present to share its experiences.

Source: BelAir Networks.

Already in 2004 I was involved in the design and build of a similar wifi@rail project for ProRail in the Netherlands, where we obtained similar promising results using WiFi-technologies. However, WiFi by its indoor-design was never intended to be used in real outdoor solutions. And although the wifi-mesh solution has benefits for covering wireless cities, the question is whether it is suitable to the more line-of-sight nature of railway-tracks. The industry has spend a lot of money in the design of a more promising wireless backhaul technology, WiMaX, with several train trials and implementations over the last years pointing out to a promising start. The rail industry is particularly looking at the high-bandwidth unlicensed backhaul (802.16d) version of WiMaX.

It is here that Jim Allison from Capital Corridor (San Francisco Bay-area) gave an insightful and realistic analysis of what is required to launch a future-proof integrated wireless broadband solution for train operators. Having trialed various wireless technologies over the last 3 years, he pointedly described the challenges from a rail-operator point of view, who does not own the tracks. In his “Who Owns The Radio Trackside Spectrum?”-presentation, he focused upon how to provide a combination of passenger, operational and security applications, using WiMaX (802.16d) technologies.

Source: Jim Allison, CCJPA.

Jim stressed the need for what he called a ‘best of both worlds’ solution, where open-standard high-bandwidth commercial vendor-solutions are combined with a specific designated “safety” frequency by the regulator (in case the 4.9GHz), similar to GSM-R situation in Europe. It is this ‘best of both worlds’ approach that I call the “WiMaX-R” solution for the future of rail-comms systems, not just in the USA, but in a global context.

In my presentation I’ve shared with the audience some experiences with recent ‘connected train’ assignments that my company has been involved in at the AsiaPac region. I’ve highlighted an assignment that was just completed for an Australian Rail-Operator/Department of Transport, where an analysis was done between the bandwidth needs of a train operator vis-à-vis the available bandwidth offered by the various technology solutions. As the train-operator was operating an obsolete analogue communications (‘trunking’) system, the potential of a ‘leapfrog’ into the IP-world was stressed by its visionary CEO.

The analysis clearly shows that especially in countries with limited cabling infrastructure and limited terrestrial (cellular) networks like Australia (but also China and India!) the potential of unlicensed high-bandwidth wireless backhaul to support the various needs of rail- and track-operators is most promising.

Now, how to turn this vision into a reality?

A good first step would be for the national/state regulatory offices to examine current and future rail-and track operators needs vis-à-vis existing/emerging technologies, and start an industry-discussion to obtain guidelines and provide funding for selected projects. OFCOM, the UK-regulator office, fortunately has kicked-off a similar initiative, and one of its leading researchers, John Parker, presented the findings during the conference. The results of the study can be downloaded here.

Although the conference did not address all of the issues raised, we cannot give credit enough to the guys from BWCS in bringing together such an excellent delegation of the rail-industry in confronting these issues.