However, the telecoms industry delivers advances at an ever increasing rate. Without an integrated, whole system strategy, it is likely the rail industry will miss opportunities or will invest in technologies that may not deliver or have limited life. Rail assets generally have longer life cycles than communications equipment, so an important aspect of the strategy is future-proofing.

The growth in data transmission carries a cost to the rail industry in terms of user charges and related equipment. The existing industry network has a finite capacity. A fundamental issue for the strategy is what rationale there could be for the rail industry to have its own data transmission capability rather than procure from the open market.

The increasing availability of inexpensive and reliable remote condition monitoring sensors, coupled with whole system integrated asset management approaches and CCTV applications, demand a capability to transmit increasing quantities of data around the rail network to make it available to rail stakeholders.

Progress and initial insights

Initial research has confirmed the need for a single, integrated strategy for rail mobile communications, which will enable the efficient and effective delivery of operational communications and support passengers’ mobile devices. A ubiquitous data network would cater for data sharing, handling, fusion, transmission and storage. Higher quality, speed and ease of use of common data would bring benefits across the system. The value of using commercial
off-the-shelf (COTS) communication services and products, avoiding wherever possible the implementation of bespoke, railway specific solutions, has also been highlighted; past experience shows the latter to be slow to market, costly and less reliable than COTS equivalents.

Quantification of demand growth for both fixed and mobile communications has been undertaken. This included identification of the passenger and operational applications with the greatest impact on bandwidth demand. The analysis considered three different projected scenarios and the impacts and requirements of each on the railway. This resulted in further work aimed at taking forward the mobile communications strategy and developing guidance on how to frame standards to reduce whole life costs and ensure maximum connectivity between applications.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) has been carrying out a study to identify the technology solutions for the delivery of rail passenger mobile broadband services. The study is expected to identify options for rollout and delivery of services and TSAG will be investigating options for integrating with this work.

There is a strong relationship with the traffic management programme - data and communications between infrastructure, trains and maintenance providers will be primary beneficiaries of the new capability. The traffic management aspirations set out in the RTS are dependent on the development and implementation of this capability.

Bandwidth to support high data-rate applications, such as video streaming, would also be facilitated.

The optimisation of whole life asset management, the related step-changes in whole system reliability and the use of optimisation models, is predicated on the generation, capture and use of high quality data. The data and communications strategy underpins their delivery.