Revolutionizing railway communications with 4G LTE

As the railway industry enters a more open and competitive world, there are three main challenges facing rail operators: guaranteeing security and safety on trains and in stations; improving the efficiency of operations; and delivering new and innovative services to passengers. Long-term evolution (LTE) technology being rolled out in more than 50 commercial mobile broadband networks across the world is able to answer these challenges. It allows carrying voice and data for train control, on-board video surveillance and bandwidth hungry infotainment services for passengers – all on a single network.

Off-the-shelf technology, it presents several key advantages for the railway industry:

• State-of-the-art digital technologies leading to transmission speeds of up to 150 Mbps over the air (down link) for new on-board broadband services deployment
• Rationalized IP-based communications into a single mobile (LTE) and fixed IP/MPLS network, fully converged to reduce operational costs
• Low latency (down to 10 ms) which supports highly time-sensitive applications
• High level Quality of Services management for running both vital and non-vital applications on a single network
• Deployment in many different frequency bands (all existing 2G and 3G bands, the new 4G bands but also the 400 MHz band used in many countries for professional mobile radio (PMR) communications
• Fully secured and resilient by including features related to encryption and authentication. A LTE network has several mechanisms for auto-reconfiguration in case of network failure.

To see LTE for railways in action, visit Alcatel-Lucent booth 2A300 – UITP from 27 to 29 May 2013, in Geneva or contact: [email protected].