Angus Kidman28 August 2007, 4:34 AM
Under fire for Next G coverage issues in Australia, Telstra has just announced a $3.6 million project to provide network services to London-Paris train operator Eurostar.
On long-distance commuter trains, notebook computers are a more frequent sight than paperback novels these days. Jump on a service in Robina, Gosford or Bacchus Marsh and elbow room will undoubtedly be at a premium as people whose jobs require them to wear suits venture towards their state capitals and catch up on a bit of light PowerPoint preparation.
With the exception of the occasional brave soul playing with a 3G card and a steady stream of low-bandwidth BlackBerry owners, however, you won't see many people actually accessing the Internet. Geographical diversity, the battery-draining nature of many mobile cards, the frequent appearance of tunnels and a lingering sense that people loathe hearing an endless stream of conversations proclaiming "I'm on the train" mean that getting a reliable signal whilst on a train is always something of an uphill struggle.
That's not to say it's impossible. This writer once experimented with getting Internet access via a Vodafone GPRS connection on the Overland train service between Melbourne and Adelaide, and managed to maintain a successful (albeit horrendously slow) connection around 70 per cent of the half-day trip. Telstra would doubtlessly claim that better results could be achieved via Next G, but that's something I'll have to check another time (it wasn't launched when I did the original run).
In the global scheme of things, Australians should count themselves relatively lucky with their access to mobile signals on public transport as it is. For instance, the underground railway platforms on city services in all our capitals have long offered enough signal to enable phone calls and checking your BlackBerry email.
London's Underground service is much more widely used, and yet experiments in offering on-platform access there have only just been announced and won't begin until April 2008. Conversely, we don't have anything to match the end-to-end WiFi service available on the Heathrow Express -- though at five pounds (close enough to $12 Australian) for a fifteen minute journey, that may not be such a loss.
In any event, all this potential commuter activity doesn't mean trains (and train operators) don't need those sorts of communications systems themselves. It's in this context that Telstra's European operations arm has scored itself a nice $3.6 million deal to connect the various operational bases of the Eurostar train network (which links London, Paris and Brussels via the Channel Tunnel) with an MPLS network. The new MPLS network will replace an ageing frame relay system. Eurostar's new London station at St Pancras, replacing the current one at Waterloo, is due to open in November, so the timeframe for getting the system working is tight.
Telstra would have faced stiff competition for the deal, so the fact it won the contract is impressive (no matter how much you want to hate Telstra for other reasons). With large rail networks in every virtually every European country, the market is rather more diverse than Australia's ever-shrinking railway system.
One area of active development has been in the promotion of GSM-R, a special variant of GSM designed for use in railway communications systems as a replacement for existing specialised radio networks. While GSM-R isn't designed for general use -- you can't leach onto it to ensure your own signal remains strong -- the fact that it uses the same core technologies as GSM means that equipment is much cheaper than with a specialised network. Nortel runs a specialised GSM-R centre of excellence in Germany, and has been actively promoting the technology to Australian railway networks for some years.
For commuters, better railway communications systems should mean more efficient railway companies and fewer service delays. Unfortunately, they don't yet translate to Internet access all along the rails -- and if they ever do, you can bet you'll be paying prices that make even Next G look cheap.
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