OneWeb LEO Satellite Trial Brings 5G Mobile to Moving UK Train

OneWeb (Eutelsat), CGI and Icomera have just conducted their first demonstration of connecting a moving railway train in North Yorkshire (England), which harnessed backhaul capacity via their constellation of ultrafast broadband satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO) to feed onboard connectivity via a 5G mobile network.

The operator has already launched 634 of their small (c.150kg) first generation (GEN1) Low Earth Orbit (LEO) broadband satellites into space – orbiting at an altitude of 1,200km above the Earth (588 of them for coverage and the rest for redundancy). The network was technically completed in March 2023 (here) and promises both ultrafast speeds and fast latency times. But some work (e.g. ground stations) still needs to be completed before full global coverage goes live by the end of 2023.

At present most trains typically deliver onboard mobile and WiFi coverage by using a combination of existing mobile coverage and specialised trackside infrastructure (e.g. small cells and fibre optic connectivity). But there may be some situations, such as trains travelling across remote rural areas, where the same could be achieved by harnessing a LEO based satellite network (obviously tunnels will still be tricky).

Project Sodor, part funded by the European Space Agency (ESA), is thus now working to trial the use of both existing terrestrial 5G networks, and the OneWeb LEO network, to deliver both operational and passenger connectivity across the rail network (hybrid networking). The initial trials will take place at the North Yorkshire Moors Railway in late October, using a Kymeta U8 user terminal installed on a rolling test bed.

Said Drew Brandy, Head of Land Mobility at Eutelsat OneWeb, said:

“The digital transformation of the railway has been underway for more than a decade now, but we are now entering a particularly exciting phase. New technologies such as our Low Earth Orbit satellite network will enable use cases and applications that we can hardly even imagine today. Critical to all of these applications will be a highly advanced, flexible and automatable communications system that ensures the capacity, responsiveness and security that railways will require.”

With the Future Railway Mobile Communications System FRMCS due to replace GSM-R and other legacy systems, this timely pilot scheme will provide significant validation as rail operators begin to plan how they will prepare and migrate their networks to take advantage of 5G-based FRMCS and the latest LEO satellite connectivity.

The big challenge here though will be proving that a OneWeb based solution can offer a cost-effective and space-saving alternative to the more traditional approaches. The trial setup isn’t exactly small (see picture above), but then demo kit tends to include a lot of hardware that wouldn’t necessarily be needed on the final product.