Softil has announced that its BEEHD technology has been selected by South Korea’s RF-Comm equipment provider to build the next generation of LTE-R high-speed train communications devices for KORAIL, South Korea’s national railroad network.
The LTE-R devices will be deployed on the Daegok to Sosa KTX intercity line, the highest class of KORAIL services, and will enter service in early 2021. The deployment is consistent with South Korea’s government’s policy that all public service communications including trains, police and firefighting services switch to broadband technologies.
RF-Comm’s CEO Dong Hyung, Kim, stated that South Korea is now on a par with China and Japan as the world’s leading high-speed railway network and only the finest communication equipment and devices can be used in bullet trains for stable and secure communications. The company chose to build RF-Comm’s new LTE-R communications devices for KORAIL using Softil’s BEEHD technology as it offers the best quality, most advanced standards-compliance, and significant time-to-market advantage.
Softil’s BEEHD technology is a cross-platform client framework designed for chipset vendors, device manufacturers, system integrators, application developers and service providers to develop IP-based mission-critical voice and video communications over LTE (VoLTE and ViLTE) solutions.
The Global System for Mobile Communications – Railway (GSM-R) has been the standard for digital railway communications for many years. But with LTE-R based devices offering lower latency, higher data capacity and better security than GSM-R systems, railway networks are now migrating to LTE-R communications devices for wireless voice and data communications inside trains, from the train to the ground and from train to train.
LTE-R supports voice communication among drivers, control center operators, maintenance and other railway staff supporting push-to-talk group communication, broadcasting, location-dependent addressing and multilevel prioritization.
RF-Comm’s devices will also allow data communication for train control signaling and other operations and maintenance as well as text messaging during voice communication. The devices will allow multimedia communication for wireless video surveillance, mobile video conference, file sharing, mobile office, and passenger infotainment services.
