Initially sponsored by the European Space Agency with the project "Broadband To Trains", 21Net has been selected by THALYS as part of a consortium that will enable the international high speed railway company to deliver true broadband Internet access to passengers travelling between Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam and Cologne.
The consortium, lead by Nokia Siemens Networks, will combine satellite, GPRS and UMTS technologies with wireless networks similar to WiFi Hotspots to provide a continuous Internet connection on board trains travelling across the borders at the speed of 300 km/h. The service is expected to be in full operation by 2008.
The UK-based 21Net has worked with leading railway operators such as RENFE (E), and SNCF (F) along with THALYS, to develop a solution combining bi-directional satellite communications with terrestrial wireless technologies. Its "Broadband To Trains" system is a robust and technical mature system that applies to the railway standards.
"We are extremely pleased to have won this important contract in conjunction with our consortium partners, Nokia Siemens Networks and Telenet," said Henry Hyde-Thomson, Chairman of 21Net. "We would like to take this opportunity to thank the European Space Agency, our satellite operator partner, Hispasat, and our railway operator partners, Renfe, SNCF and, of course, Thalys, for their important involvement in the testing, commercial trial and productization of our Broadband To Trains system over the last three years."
In 2005, as part of the ESA-sponsored project, 21Net designed, built and trialled a Wi-Fi access system for use on trains with the capability to support broadband internet and intranet access as well as local multimedia content such as short films and up-to-the minute news. 21Net equipped a THAYLS trainset and operated a commercial Internet On Board service between Paris, Brussels and Amsterdam. This commercial trial confirmed the strong interest in using the Internet onboard high speed trains, and demonstrated that 21Net has mastered the technology to deliver true broadband to high speed trains.
"Since 2004, Internet to trains has been and still is a hot topic for train operators and the competition between different solutions and their providers is strong," said Norbert Huebner, ESA technical officer for The Broadband To Trains project. "All the more, we are pleased that we were instrumental in the development of 21Net's solution to become successful in the market."
The 21Net system architecture is based on two-way Ku-band satellite system to provide connectivity between the Internet backbone and a master server on the train.
A hub station provides the connection from the Internet backbone (and from the network operations centre) via the satellite directly to a low-profile tracking antenna on the train. GPRS and Wi-Fi access between the train and available networks is also provided in stations and in tunnels, for example.
On the train, WiFi (wireless LAN) connections are used between the master server and customers with WiFi enabled laptops and PDAs.
21Net has mastered the use of a unique mobile DVB/RCS modem to share the satellite bandwidth across all the trains of the fleet, allocating bandwidth on demand according to the usage level of the train. With 21Net, Satellite bandwidth scales linearly with Internet use.
The use of two-way Ku-band satellite transmission enables 21Net to deliver high bandwidth (2Mbit/s by 512kbit/s) connectivity to the train which can be shared by simultaneous users. This puts 21Net in an entirely different class to existing competitor systems, which rely on narrowband (56kbit/s) GPRS connections which are then shared between the simultaneous users on the train. For more information, see the documentation and contact links at the right of this page.
