Thales & Nokia to upgrade London Underground’s multi-service network

Transport for London has chosen mission-critical comms vendor and systems integrator Thales and connectivity partner Nokia to upgrade the system powering London Underground’s internal communications network, Connect.

The Connect network, designed and maintained by Thales for 20 years, provides the radio, transmission, and operational CCTV communications tech for TfL staff to use on the underground.

Connect is hosted by a multi-service network (MSN), initially provided by incumbent Ericsson.

During a press round table in central London, where Chatham House Rules applied, spokespeople from TfL, Nokia, and Thales discussed what the contract meant for the future of the London Underground’s operations.

Apart from ensuring passenger safety, one of the most significant uses of the MSN, according to TfL, is talk groups between railway station staff to ensure that passengers with accessibility needs have the support they need.

According to TfL, while the current system operates at 99.9% availability, legacy systems can gradually become unreliable, potentially disrupting services and leading to passenger journey delays.

One of the challenges of the new system, according to Thales, is maintaining this reliability across 272 stations and rolling out the new system on a complex 150-year-old brownfield site.

The renewal was commissioned to ensure that the MSN continues to operate at peak performance and to accommodate extra bandwidth to host future applications.

TfL said that new applications it may add in the future include predictive maintenance, telemetry, and real-time monitoring of station assets.

Nokia’s mission-critical internet protocol/multi-protocol label switching routing system provides the backbone, offering what it claims is “secure, reliable, and scalable connectivity”.

Nokia added that the telco provider would also support the mission-critical system in the long term.

Thales’ Ground Transport Systems (GTS), the division which runs Connect, mentioned that it has already carried out a critical radio upgrade of the Connect system, replacing 295 radio base stations.

Thales added that the project’s next stage will focus on the fibre network, connecting the remaining elements.

Like the previous system, the new MSN will support the emergency services network Airwave, which Thales also co-runs.

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Driverless trains on the underground?

After the round table, Andy Bell, the vice president of Thales Transport UK, spoke exclusively to TechInformed.

He mentioned that one of the biggest challenges for GTS during this project was to ensure that, with partners Nokia and TfL, they came up with a solution that was “future-proof” during the concept design phase without knowing precisely what the future might hold.

Asked whether the contractors were urged to consider driverless trains as part of this future concept — which would require onboard CCTV cameras that present their own connectivity challenges) — a TfL spokesperson said that while this wasn’t part of the contract’s scope, they considered it important to have “enough bandwidth for a network to scale in the future.”

Bell stated that the network accommodated all operational possibilities when asked if Thales was encouraged to consider driverless cabs from a safety perspective as part of the future concept. He used the example of the Docklands Light Railway (DLR), which Thales began working on over thirty years ago.

“For [driverless trains], the network doesn’t really change. That’s more to do with the signalling. If you look at the driverless DLR trains in operation across London, they still have a guard on the train to make sure everything is running.

“So, you need reliable comms between the control centre and whoever is on the train — no matter where the operator is situated on the train. It does not change the need for a reliable high-integrity comms system,” he said.

AI and predicitive analytics

According to Bell, using AI and analytics to improve the CCTV offering has the potential to provide a great opportunity for passengers in the future.

“Whether that’s information about crowding on platforms, crowds from football matches, or misplaced luggage — there are so many applications where technology could help,” he said.

Bell added that the big challenge in this instance was processing the data and trying to turn it into useful information.

“How do you take all that data, all the CCTV images that are going on, and use AI or data analytics to, for instance, spot whether there’s an incident happening in Baker Street or overcrowding in Liverpool Street?

“How do we get tech to automate this and feedback in real-time? Right now, it’s very reliant on the human eye, and then the operator making decisions on what to do or how to react.

“Using technology to help in this process is a real opportunity. The network has more capacity as the tech gets smarter; it can automate some of this decision-making process.”

Bell added that Thales is investigating heavily in AI.

“We do a lot of data analytics, looking at patterns and learning from trends. We’re trying to apply it to things like: ‘What does an overcrowded platform look like? What do certain behaviours look like? — to spot issues before they occur. It’s an evolving field of investigation.”