Rail
A new day dawns for rail
Just like public safety, the railway community is embracing the latest 3GPP technology,
but with Europe’s countries needing to migrate in lockstep, more co-ordination is needed,
as Sam Fenwick discovers
One of life’s little ironies is that the business
of making things go fast is often one which
is slow and methodical when it comes to
change, given safety considerations and
the sheer amount of players, assets and
capital involved. In the world of railways, big change
is ahead in the form of the impending transition from
GSM-R – a standard for railway communications that
was developed in the second half of the 1990s – to its
replacement, Future Rail Mobile Communications System
(FRMCS). This is needed, given the limited number of
vendors that support GSM-R, their uncertain support for
the standard beyond 2030, and the potential benefits of
aligning the railway communications community with the
telecommunications sector.
GSM-R currently handles voice and data for security
and train tracking applications, and provides the
communications that allow ETCS (European train control
systems) to function. Both GSM-R and ETCS are part of
the ERTMS (European rail traffic management system)
standard, which is defined by the International Union of
Railways (UIC) and is designed to allow interoperability
between cross-border traffic.
Robert Sarfati, chair of the ETSI Technical Committee for
Rail Telecommunications (TC RT) and current chairman of
the UIC’s European Radio Implementers Group (ERIG), says
FRMCS is a UIC project. He adds that radio standardisation
is conducted within TC RT and 3GPP. UIC is the author of
the User Requirements Specifications (URS) document and
responsible for its subsequent updating after submitting it to
a broad review by interested stakeholders. UIC is providing
the use-cases, with ETSI’s TC RT subjecting them to a review
analysis (ie, determining which of the use-cases’ requirements
are relevant to 3GPP and conducting the initial gap analysis);
followed by 3GPP working to fill the gaps in the normative
domain. The latter process is still ongoing, and like the
development of other mission-critical features spans multiple
3GPP releases. The 3GPP work involves rail transport users
and industry. It also involves input from the public safety
community, which along with other verticals will benefit
16 www.criticalcomms.com October 2019
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