Study on feasibility of SATCOM for railway communication

Final Report
or GEO/C-band, as well as a hypothetical MEO/C-band, would be ideally suited as GSM-R
replacements compared to the existing terrestrial communications, bearing in mind that:
Such a competitive edge is dependent on the cost of terminals.
SATCOM‘s competitiveness is dependent on the need to deploy new base stations for
competing terrestrial technologies, such as LTE, compared to the current GSM-R deployment,
which will be able to be reused by such mobile solutions.
A future review of functional requirements to eliminate the need for voice communications
would make the position of SATCOM solutions even stronger.
Narrowband solutions would severely hinder the growing offering of value-added services by
Railway Undertakings. Nevertheless, they could prove a suitable direct successor to GSM-R.
Broadband solutions expand the possibility to open new markets for the rail users generating
multiple sources of revenue and being able to recover the strong initial investments required to provide
the service. Broadband solutions are an especially good alternative for GSM-R replacement when
considering that:
The key assets (e.g. antenna) of SATCOM broadband solutions are their flexibility and
scalability for deployment, together with their OPEX-intensive model. This is in contrast with
the necessary CAPEX needed to upgrade LTE (the main broadband terrestrial technology)
from a fully functional-focused deployment to a user added value-capable system.
As a result, SATCOM could be deployed progressively and—to a considerable degree—by
sharing costs among railway undertakings, while LTE would put a high burden on
infrastructure managers, requiring the full coverage deployment for specific rail lines before
reaching operational capability.
Global economic results suggest that GEO/Ka-band could provide a competitive alternative to
LTE while, at the same time, leverage the above assets. Comparatively, LTE could provide
either a stronger or a significantly weaker business case, depending on the need to deploy
additional new-build ground stations in order to support a high frequency, high data rate
solution at high speed.
From the business point of view, narrowband SATCOM solutions could stand as a strong option for
providing safety-critical applications for rail, especially if a future maturation of requirements should
segregate or eliminate the need to support voice communications together with safety-critical data. In
addition, SATCOM solutions can help to introduce ERTMS on those lines where, due to the high cost
of terrestrial infrastructure, it is not deployed yet.
In comparison, for such a case, and assuming a Brownfield scenario (i.e. where a current GSM-R
infrastructure is deployed) a modest implementation of LTE would prove competitive against SATCOM
narrowband solutions with a slightly higher cost, provided a generous re-utilisation and upgradability
for current GSM-R infrastructure was carried out. For a Greenfield scenario (i.e. on a deployment from
scratch where there is no infrastructure to re-use), LTE losses its competitiveness regarding SATCOM
solutions, since it is required a whole infrastructure deployment along the line(s) where to provide the
service.
Meanwhile, broadband solutions offer the possibility of incorporating a source of revenue that, if
leveraged wisely from a commercial point of view, could lead to profitability—resulting in a very high
Doc.Nº: SRAIL-FNR-010-IND
Edit./Rev.: 1/1
Date: 16/02/2017
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