The Future of Rail-Communications: WiMaX-R?
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.
