Siemens to build mobile network for Indian Rlys

NEW DELHI: The Siemens Communications Group has received an order from Indian Railways to build mobile networks for railroad communication. In India, the first project will involve Siemens equipping around 700 kilometers of rail track for the Indian Railways subsidiary North Frontier Railways in the northeastern states of West Bengal, Bihar and Assam with GSM Railway (GSM-R).

GSM-R is based on the international mobile communication standard GSM and is used to integrate voice and data applications required for railway communications within a single system.

Indian Railways alone, as one of the world's largest railway companies, operates a rail network with around 63,000 kilometers of track and 14,000 trains that transport over a million tons of freight and more than 14 million passengers daily. Over the next few years, Indian Railways wants to equip its main routes in India with GSM-R, in order to improve security and reliability. The order value for this first project totals about 4.5 million euros.

For the new projects in India, Siemens will install the entire infrastructure for the GSM-R network and supply all the components needed for operation. These range from switching centers, base stations, and service and administration platforms, to elements for data transmission from the base station to the controller, and the mobile handsets for the engine driver.

Siemens will also supply Indian Railways with its solution railway@vantage, which covers specific applications for train traffic such as Location Dependent Addressing (LDA) and Functional Addressing. The engine driver will thus, for example, be able to reach the control center at the nearest station automatically at the press of a button on his GSM-R mobile phone, without having to dial the center separately.