Rail Telecom Services

Railway networks connect communities and support economic growth. But these complex networks require advanced solutions to ensure they meet the growing demand for services. ATDI provides cost-effective and sustainable telecom network solutions to meet those demands.

Railway operators rely on different technologies to support rail operations.

• Radio systems provide critical comms support for railway operations, such as train driver to traffic control, group communications for rail safety, communications for train operations and coverage around stations. They are also used to support business-related communications such as maintenance, ticketing and energy metering;
• Communication transmission systems based on wireless or fibre;
• IP networks to support distributed systems, communication networks and operation command centres;
• Indoor and tunnel coverage for tunnel systems, railway and underground stations and other buildings. In addition to wide-area-coverage, plans and designs for the optimal indoor coverage and integration with outdoor networks;
• SCADA networks to control and support supervisory management of railway assets and monitoring systems.

Today’s railways present a new set of challenges for telecom networks including international border-crossing interoperability and increased rail track capacity.

GSM-R and other radio technologies are essential to the efficient running of railway operations. They offer a variety of voice and data communications services and manage a large number of radio frequencies used by different radio applications, systems and users. Using a spectrum management solution ensures adequate spectrum is available for network coverage and capacity, without causing undue interference to other radio users.

With the increase in spectrum scarcity, the rail industry continues to look for new and innovative approaches to spectrum management. Initiatives like spectrum sharing, hardware improvements (receivers), using frequencies in higher bandwidths and the use of more spectrum-efficient technologies are now being witnessed.

In addition, railway network operators have seen an increase in demands for services such as:

• passenger in-train services and applications, which demand increased spectrum capacity and network harmonisation;
• seamless communications across all railway applications;
• new applications based on virtualised IT platform and cloud;
• increased focus on network safety and mission-critical communications based on IP technologies.

Check out our case studies for the Rail sector.