UK: South Western Railway passengers can now use Rail-5G wi-fi supplied by FirstGroup’s railway telecoms company Evo-rail to obtain high speed internet connectivity on trains travelling between Earlsfield in London and Basingstoke.
FirstGroup, which operated SWR until recently, said this was the first deployment of its kind in Europe. The rail-5G concept uses mmWave technology with trackside poles and antennae installed along the route and on the trains to create a bespoke network, accessible to both the trains’ operational systems and passengers. The supplier says this offers connections up to 20 times faster than conventional onboard wi-fi, which uses the wider telecoms network where speeds are limited by the connection to local masts and rationed among hundreds of users.
Rail-5G can support video calls, streaming and downloading large files. The supplier estimates that a full HD 1080 video of around 5 GB could be downloaded in about 4 min, a full album in less than 10 sec and a 10-episode series of a show in about 15 min.
The rollout on 70 km of SWR main line completed in May followed a successful pilot of the technology on the Island Line on the Isle of Wight, and another on the Figueres – Perpignan high speed line between Spain and France.
