A 10 Gbit/s Ethernet infrastructure for future-proofed railway communications

摘要

The UK and European Rail industry is enjoying renewed business and public custom because end-to-end journey times are now competitive with short-haul flights. There is now the further expectation that train wireless connectivity and "infotainment" experience will vie with that of aircraft. With 600 passengers, a 10 Mbit/s bandwidth expectation per customer equates to 6 Gbit/s aggregate throughput; a serious bottleneck. This paper describes an upgrade of on-train communication capacity to 10 Gbit/s or 10GBASE-T Ethernet using rail-approved, copper-media cabling. In essence, data-centre technical advances have been deployed in the hostile train environment whilst acquiring all the requisite rail approvals along the way.