DB Systel, subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn and provider of ICT services in Germany, and Huawei have jointly announced today that DB Systel has acquired a modern IP core based GSM-Railway (GSM-R) system from Huawei. GSM-R is an international wireless communications standard for railway communications and applications, and the system will be used in DB Systel's test laboratory to examine future-oriented network architectures for GSM-R.
DB Systel plans to conduct product and interoperability testing for its own purposes to examine interaction between Huawei`s system architectures with existing architectures in the GSM-R network. With this acquisition, DB Systel's test laboratory provides access to GSM-R equipment from Huawei for the first time.
In April 2009, Huawei successfully launched its GSM-R communication system for the Shijiazhuang-Taiyuan passenger transport railway, which can reach speeds of up to 250km/h and covers 189.93km throughout China. The Shijiazhuang-Taiyuan railway includes the longest tunnel in Asia – the 28km Taihang double-tube tunnel, and Huawei's GSM-R solution is said to have solved the coverage problems previously experienced inside 'super long' tunnels. By the end of 2009, more than 4000km of railway lines had been contracted to Huawei. In January 2010, Huawei was contracted for the delivery of a GSM-R system to RailCorp NSW, Australia by UGL. Huawei's digital train radio system will cover 1,455 kilometers of track, stables and rail sidings and 70 kilometres of railway tunnels across the Sydney metropolitan rail network.
"Optimising new telecommunications systems for different vendors for railway purposes is a core business within our test lab and necessary to provide market overview" said Wolfgang Klein, Head of Systems Engineering and Network Operations of DB Systel.
"We are confident that Huawei's innovative GSM-R solution will meet DB Systel requirements and will help them in their mission to examine interactions between state-of-the-art system architectures of Huawei with architectures already implemented by DB Systel'' said Tan Zhu, director of Wireless Marketing Huawei Europe.