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Starlink on Trains

jon1

ULTIMATE Member
I'm back with another case study from a UK starlink reseller, this one seems a lot more practical to me

The cost of deploying starlink on a train; let's say in a bulk deal they get the equipment for circa £250/train and £100 a month in service costs, and it costs £750 per train to deploy it (this could be a gross under or over estimate, I'm not really sure)

Atleast in service cost, it is pretty close to what I imagine most train companies already pay for LTE SIMs on a business plan, but where I see the real cost savings is the cost of mobile phone companies to deploy phone coverage, often where nobody other than train passengers need it and only connect to the cell site for brief minutes or even seconds, surely it would be more practical to use Starlink or OneWeb (if it gets close to the level of service) in these situations?

This is already deployed somewhere - https://api.starlink.com/public-files/Brightline.pdf
 
I would suggest those numbers are gross underestimates, especially the cost of installing equipment on a train, excluding any costs required to get Starlink equipment certified to EN 45545-2.

Also people don't want to have to connect to train Wi-Fi for their phones to work. Current government/Network Rail priority is to improve 4G/5G availability on commuter routes and I agree with that approach.
 
as with your other starlink example - it doesn't work indoors (ie under station roofs and in tunnels) and it would probably not work so well where there's significant tree coverage. Starlink also won't have a certified device for rail use.

makes more sense to change the law to allow the mobile companies to make better use of Network Rail assets, such as the fibre they have running alongside virtually every rail line and any masts NR might want to make available for use

They already have masts that literally cover every square foot of the line because GSMR requires constant coverage, particularly on lines that use ETCS and every train is constantly exchanging position data. As I understand it they have shortcut the traditional planning permission process because it's a safety critical network, and if the public networks moved in then they'd have to get permission.
 
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I'm not sure if Starlink is the best technology to be using on the railways -- they often don't have a clear and unobstructed view of the sky.

Given railways require a lot of infrastructure (two rails and signalling at minimum, plus potentially electrification) it seems odd that we can't get decent mobile signal rolled out and / or on-train connectivity.
 
I'm not sure if Starlink is the best technology to be using on the railways -- they often don't have a clear and unobstructed view of the sky.

Given railways require a lot of infrastructure (two rails and signalling at minimum, plus potentially electrification) it seems odd that we can't get decent mobile signal rolled out and / or on-train connectivity.
What he said.
 
Also WiFi isn't handled by the train operators.. they engage a company like icomera or Nomad Digital. They managed the connectivity, fail over between SIMS and management of the WiFi points along the train.

The deals would need to be done with those installers / maintainers.
 
Openmptcprouter would be great for trains
Add every UK mobile network and glue them all together
 
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You've just invented what those companies already do :)
It’s astonishingly sh*t, southeastern is limited to 150MB (as in usage), and you can barley hold a WiFi call for 1 minute

Sure, the numbers are gross underestimates I expected so, but even still I think trains have a good enough view of the sky for this to work, I doubt we’ll ever see mobile networks get to the train tunnels outside of London
 
They already have masts that literally cover every square foot of the line because GSMR requires constant coverage, particularly on lines that use ETCS and every train is constantly exchanging position data. As I understand it they have shortcut the traditional planning permission process because it's a safety critical network, and if the public networks moved in then they'd have to get permission.
Can’t they deploy infra for other networks to use and share access to it?
 
You've just invented what those companies already do :)
I've seen some broadcast solutions that also merge multiple mobile networks and say it's "broadcast quality" and some of them are even 3G! I've even seen one of them in London with a great big backpack with antennas sticking out. I was curious so I just asked them and they said yep, it's a load-balancing/aggregation system. These systems cost tens of thousands as well.

I don't know the ins and outs of what they actually use to do this, but i'd imagine it's quite similar to openmptcprouter. maybe MLVPN or similar?
 
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Can’t they deploy infra for other networks to use and share access to it?
i think the answer would be the same either way - NR would have to seek full planning permission and the NIMBYs would do their best to derail it (pun not intended).

if not for that I would imagine the MNOs would be jumping at the chance to cover the major lines
 
I've seen some broadcast solutions that also merge multiple mobile networks and say it's "broadcast quality" and some of them are even 3G! I've even seen one of them in London with a great big backpack with antennas sticking out. I was curious so I just asked them and they said yep, it's a load-balancing/aggregation system. These systems cost tens of thousands as well.

I don't know the ins and outs of what they actually use to do this, but i'd imagine it's quite similar to openmptcprouter. maybe MLVPN or similar?
more than that, since they have to do the video/audio compression (the box I saw demonstrated took SDI/professional digital video from a camera). i would assume there's some clever encoding to get around the fundamentally lossy nature of wireless comms. it will also use wifi or ethernet if available (useful for live interviews at someone's home for example, just plug into their router if its fast enough)

probably very proprietary, but even at a few thousand a pop it will pay for itself given the cost of satellite time and the increased flexibility.
 
more than that, since they have to do the video/audio compression (the box I saw demonstrated took SDI/professional digital video from a camera). i would assume there's some clever encoding to get around the fundamentally lossy nature of wireless comms. it will also use wifi or ethernet if available (useful for live interviews at someone's home for example, just plug into their router if its fast enough)

probably very proprietary, but even at a few thousand a pop it will pay for itself given the cost of satellite time and the increased flexibility.
Yep I worked for sky (NDS actually) a loooong time ago. The kit required to do broadcast required at least 4U in a rack and the power to power it. You're right, there's more at play than simply just a router there. Although i'd imagine the internet link aggregating links is something similar to what I mentioned. Satellite mux's for example are super insane expensive. Shame I don't have any photos of those days, (NDS were totally paranoid about that stuff, probably for good reason).

But i'm sure us lot could hack something together for considerably less ;)
 
southeastern is limited to 150MB (as in usage), and you can barley hold a WiFi call for 1 minute
Remember using GWR WiFi a while ago and I think that was 2mbps which was fine I guess, probably using Three (O2 would probably perform better than Three I bet)
 
Remember using GWR WiFi a while ago and I think that was 2mbps which was fine I guess, probably using Three (O2 would probably perform better than Three I bet)
Southwest barely has any wifi, thameslink doesn't ever work (and if it does you get a whopping 500MB before you need to either pay , or change the MAC address ;) ) It's unworkable.

I used to work in Stockholm, and you absolutely could work on the train/tunnelbana etc. 100% coverage. No drops. Ever. And this was going back to 2012. We just can't be bothered to invest. We could have a working mobile coverage for trains, we just don't want to invest in it. Britain in a nutshell.
 
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Actually we have been doing a lot of work in the area of using a combination of satellite communications (primarily Starlink and OneWeb) and terrestrial communications to improve Wifi and other connectivity services on trains. This is partly funded by the European Space Agency and UK Space Agency.

It is more expensive than some of the figures quoted above (in particular there is an expensive process to approve, undertake and test the engineering work on rail - you can't just stick a terminal on and hope for the best like people do on their cars). Despite recent reductions in costs certainly satellite will still be more expensive than terrestrial. But if you can balance across both intelligently and only use a large amount of satellite bandwidth when you really need to the cost can be affordable.

In tests using a combination of satellite and terrestrial services we have already demonstrated over 600Mbps downlink and we are working with some of the main UK rail operators to bring this to trial on operational railways soon.

The LEO constellations (Starlink and OneWeb) actually have very good availability because although there are sometimes bridges or trees in the way there are usually multiple satellites in the sky at any one time. And this is much more cost-effective than installing new mobile towers in rural locations.

Gareth (CGI)
 
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