During this month’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Huawei and fellow Chinese company Casco launched a train system based on FRMCS.

The Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) is a worldwide standard built on 5G technology for railway communications to succeed GSM-R.

The system launched at MWC uses an FRMCS provided by Huawei and the TACN system provided by rail transit integrator Casco. It has already been implemented by a railway in Africa, achieving a 60% increase in transport capacity.

Global railway development is facing three major challenges: low transportation efficiency, soaring upgrade costs and increasingly complex safety issues. Conventional railway systems result in long train tracking intervals, limiting increases to line capacity. Railway system upgrades rely on a vast array of trackside equipment, resulting in heavy investment, lengthy reconstruction, and complex operations and maintenance (O&M). And insufficient bandwidth for train-to-ground communications prevents real-time fault detection, failing to comply with safety standards.

Huawei (www.huawei.com) and Casco (www.crsc.cn) have released the FRMCS-based TACN, which incorporates precise multi-source fusion location involving satellite positioning, multimodal wireless communications and autonomous train integrity monitoring to enable functionalities such as moving block. It can be used for conventional and freight railways.

For the railway in Africa, the deployment of TACN has already helped achieve an annual transport capacity of 100 million tons.

The FRMCS network offer high bandwidth, low latency and reliability. It enables the system to deliver movement authority instantly via FRMCS-powered train-to-ground communications, transforming train tracking. This shortens train headways to under three minutes and increases line capacity by 60%. The primary-backup function in intra-frequency dual-network redundancy networking delivers 99.999% reliability.

With 20Mbit/s bandwidth, it supports the predictive O&M of railway systems, enhancing train safety and punctuality. The wireless communications design also simplifies facilities, cutting initial construction investment and ongoing maintenance costs. Looking ahead, the FRMCS network will provide the foundation for advanced intelligence, such as for locomotive synchronisation, perimeter protection and beyond visual line of sight train operations.

This enables global railways to achieve significant capacity gains, cost savings and safety improvements with optimised investments, driving quality and sustainable development across the railway industry.