telecommunications
Gigabit cell phone network is being tested on tracks
A new project by Deutsche Bahn and various telecommunications companies is intended to ensure a stable cell phone network on railway tracks. photo
© Hauke-Christian Dittrich/dpa
It’s a known issue. Those who sit on the train usually have a bad internet connection rather than a good one. A new project is set to change that.
Deutsche Bahn and several telecommunications companies have started a 5G project to ensure that the mobile phone network on railway tracks is stable and transmits at gigabit speed despite the massive increase in data requirements. The Federal Ministry of Transport, the railways, the network operator Telefónica (O2) and other companies in Berlin announced that a funding decision worth 6.4 million euros had been handed over.
The approximately ten-kilometer-long train route to which the project relates is located in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Ten new masts are to be erected there, and the project will run until the end of 2024. A frequency band is used that transmits a particularly large amount of data at breakneck speed.
The background to the project is the rapidly increasing demand for data in the Internet age: video conferences, downloading large files and streaming films or music are becoming more and more a matter of course – not only at home, but also on the go.
So far, however, so-called area frequencies have been used along the rails, which have a large range but low throughput: Ultimately, these area frequencies will not be sufficient in future to cover the immense data requirements on the train. With the higher frequency band used in the project, the data throughput is higher, but the range is lower – accordingly, many more masts are required than have been installed along the railway lines up to now.