Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona Expands its Fleet of Teltronic Onboard Terminals

Transports Metropolitans de Barcelona (TMB), the main public transport company in the metropolitan area of ​​the Catalan capital, continues renewing its bus fleet and, with it, its trust in Teltronic, which will be responsible for supplying the equipment of radio communications for the new vehicles.

The terminals provided are communications equipment that have the peculiarity that they are embedded in a rack specially designed to be installed on buses. The new 84 units are added to those already in operation, so Teltronic equips the nearly 1,200 buses that comprise the fleet of Barcelona, with almost 100 lines in operation.

Both companies continue deepening in a relationship that began more than a decade ago, when Teltronic was selected to supply a TETRA communications network that could provide service to the bus network. The deployment of its NEBULA infrastructure consisted of a Network Control Node and repeater base stations that allow full coverage of the city.

One of the main strengths of the system is that it allows the updating of the position of the entire fleet in only 20 seconds. This is possible because the positioning data of each vehicle is sent to the Control Centre through the intelligent application SDM (Synchronous Data Manager), Teltronic patent, which is characterized by offering minimum refresh times, avoiding network overloads.

Thus, with the positioning data received, control centre can inform passengers in real time about the status of the journey, arrival times or incidents; visualize the current position of the vehicles and monitor the status of all of them; and calculate the gap between the marked schedule and the one actually carried by the vehicles so that the operator can make different actions to maintain scheduled services: introduce or eliminate resources in the lines, send instructions to the driver to increase or decrease the speed, etc.

ALSO IN METRO. The collaboration between TMB and Teltronic is also extended to suburban transport, since the company was responsible for the TETRA communication system in line 9 of the Barcelona Metro, which, with automatic driverless trains, requires data capacity and, in this way, be able to manage the commands sent to and from the Control Centre, which remotely controls the operation of the trains.

For this project, Teltronic also deployed the infrastructure consisting of several base stations that guarantee full coverage along the line (tunnels and passenger stations) and terminals on board the trains that were specially designed to comply with the railway regulations.