The 5GRail project ticked off an important milestone following its successful field demonstration last week. The project partners and representatives from the European Commission joined DB’s Lab ICE “advanced TrainLab” as it performed a demo run on the 5GRail testbed in Annaberg, Germany.

Several railway operational and performance applications were successfully demonstrated including: voice calls including group calls; railway emergency calls (in FRMCS, GSM-R, co-existence FRMCS and GSM-R, and transition from FRMCS to GSM-R modes); uplink video streaming; and multiple applications over the same TOBA – video and voice call simultaneously.

This was performed via the 5GRail FRMCS network (3GPP 5G Stand Alone, Mission Critical).

Since 2020, 18 5GRail partners from 11 European countries have been working to design and build prototypes for the future rail communication system and for the applications to be tested – ETCS, ATO, Voice including REC, TCMS, PIS, Video and Remote Vision. A novel train onboard architecture (TOBA) gateway concept has been realised and many of the functionalities of 3GPP’s Mission Critical Service framework have been implemented.

The prototypes delivered by the 5GRail project, tested in lab and in field tests in France and Germany, are a major and solid step towards the FRMCS 1st edition, which will be the first FRMCS system that railways can implement. The specifications for this system are expected to be introduced in CCS TSI in Q2 2027.

The 5GRail project is co-financed by DG Connect, as part of 5G CAM ICT 053.