POLISH infrastructure manager PKP PLK signed a letter of intent with Ericsson at last week’s InnoTrans exhibition to test the Future Railway Mobile Communication System (FRMCS) in Poland.
The 5G communications solution will be installed at the Polish Railway Institute’s facilities in Żmigród, near Wrocław in western Poland.
Specifically, Ericsson will deliver mission-critical network solutions aimed at demonstrating the benefits of 5G for railway telecommunications and to prepare for migration to FRMCS in Poland. This will include Ericsson’s radio system for the dedicated FRMCS band n101 (1900MHz) together with an enclosure and power solution, as well as the Local Packet Gateway for integration with Orange Poland’s and T-Mobile Poland’s 5G standalone network.
Ericsson will also provide guidance from its research and development centres in Łódź and Kraków where teams will be responsible for the architecture, configuration and optimisation of the delivered solutions.
Preparations for the project will begin by the end of this year and the trial will run until the second half of 2027.
“The learnings taken from this trial will not only benefit the strategic migration of Poland’s railways away from GSM-R, it will also contribute to the standardisation of FRMCS in the near future,” says Mr Martin Mellor, head of Ericsson Poland.
The letter of intent extends a previous letter signed by Ericsson, NetWorks, the Polish Railway Institute and Alstom in September 2023 to test FRMCS in the Polish market.