FTA on track to the first bearer independent communication solution for railways in Europe

As pre-announced in early June 2016, Frequentis was awarded the contract from the Finnish Transport Agency (FTA, in Finnish Liikennevirasto) to implement the first bearer independent communication solution for railway communication in Europe. The so called Unified Railway Communication and Application (URCA) fulfils FTA’s need for a cost saving transitional solution to the successor of GSM-R. By utilising TETRA and public mobile networks FTA takes the first step to the prospective Future Railway Mobile Communication System standard of the International Union of Railways (UIC).

With the Frequentis Unified Railway Communication and Application (URCA), Finnish railway users will be able to smoothly migrate communication from GSM-R to the governmentally administrated TETRA network VIRVE (short for 'Viranomaisradioverkko', i.e. radio network for authorities) as well as the public mobile networks for rail-specific operational communication services. These services include functional addressing, train list and location dependent addressing. This challenging project is planned to go live in late 2017.

The end-to-end solution is based on the Frequentis fixed terminal rail communication system FTS 3020 and will provide an entirely new set of options beyond GSM-R. The contract further includes voice recording and apps for public mobile phones – ninety fixed working positions will be deployed.

“The Frequentis solution will improve operational and cost efficiency, reduce complexity, accelerate the deployment of new services, and eliminate costs and concerns around training and acceptance. We can concentrate on solutions and applications instead of spending time and money for renewal of our own radio network only for railway communication”, highlights Markku Voutilainen, Senior Inspector Project Manager of Railway Communications at FTA.

“Frequentis is playing a pioneering role in bringing unified communication to a digital rail environment with a single converged platform covering all communication. We recently received a patent for our Bearer Independent Rail Communication Architecture (BIRCA), which will become a part of the URCA solution. With the first railway-specific bearer independent solution in Finland we go one step further showing our company expertise in this field. In June, we won the Future Tech Award at 2016 Critical Communications World for our solution in the area of Public Safety ‘Unified Radio Gateway’. It is deployed in North-Rhine Westphalia providing centralised network entry points for sixty fire service control rooms”, Thomas Karl, Director Public Transport at Frequentis, said.

Picture: Contract signing: Raimund Palka, Key Account Manager at Frequentis; Seppo Mäkitupa, Head of Unit Railway Technology at FTA