Presented by Huawei

Southern African railways must accelerate the shift from GSM-R to FRMCS standard

Partner

 ·3 Nov 2023

By Guo Guoqing, President of Huawei Sub-Saharan Africa Enterprise Business.

Success in the railway industry depends on safety, reliability, and affordability, with both operators and its customers expecting flawless service – but this requires communications networks that perform to the highest level.

GSM-R, which is the current default communication platform for railway operators in the Southern African Development Community (SADC), is increasingly incapable of matching that ideal.

While the 2G-based communication standard has been used successfully for the last 20-plus years, today, the decline of GSM-R is constraining the innovation of the digital railway due to its complex, tangled architecture.

With its narrow 4 MHz bandwidth, GSM-R capacity is not large enough to meet requirements and is limiting the flexibility of services such as railway multimedia dispatching communications, railway infrastructure smart management, trackside IoT, prediction maintenance and passenger service information transmission.

As such, it’s vital that railway operators evolve to a new communications platform that is capable of meeting the requirements of contemporary railways. The LTE-based FRMCS is precisely that platform, particularly if it’s implemented properly.

The benefits of FRMCS, over GSM-R, are clear. Beyond doubt, we see an increase in safety, efficiency – 500km/h as opposed to 350-400km/h with GSM-R, and an increased data rate – from 9.6 Kbps with GSM-R to 100 Mbps, with the cloud-based architecture of 4G and beyond.

These benefits are further evidenced by more than 130 rail and metro lines around the world that are already utilising LTE and beyond 2 000km of track.

As such, it is clear that FRMCS is the way forward for the future of rail radio communications and a key step in rail’s digital development.

The shift to FRMCS need not be costly either, particularly for railway operators partnering with Huawei. Naturally, replacing the entire network is costly for any railway operator.

With this in mind, Huawei’s solution supports a smooth evolution from GSM-R to FRMCS, with flexible interworking.

This approach also mitigates the increasing costs associated with continuing to use GSM-R due to the declining supplement. Huawei’s own technologies, meanwhile, can help further drive down the costs associated with moving to FRMCS.

More particularly, technologies such as Huawei’s unique 8T8R multi-array smart antennas (see figure below) improve the coverage by 10 to 15 percent compared with the industry’s 4T4R technology, allowing for fewer base stations and cost savings.

Huawei’s unique dual-network solution at the same site also improves the reliability of the FRMCS radio network to 99.999% (Huawei unique).

As such, the value presented in upgrading software from GSM-R to LTE, becomes evident.

It is clear as rail enters the next stage in its digital development, that next-gen safety requires a next-gen communication standard.

Some would even argue that communication is the main battlefield of railway digitalisation. Knowing that, we believe broadband-based FRMCS is key in enabling railway’s digital transformation.