Huawei completing China's first WCDMA/GSM railway network
Beijing. August 27. INTERFAX-CHINA - China's first WCDMA/GSM high-speed railway network linking Fuzhou City in Fujian Province and Wenzhou City in Zhejiang Province is nearing completion, according to an Aug. 26 announcement by Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd., which is building the network.
To date, Huawei has installed 85 percent of the base stations along the railway, which will be capable of providing connection speeds of up to 6.2 Megabits per second (Mbps), according to Huawei's internal tests.
Huawei built the network with HSDPA (High-Speed Downlink Packet Access), an advanced version of WCDMA, to ensure that both WCDMA and GSM signals are available along the entire length of the railway, including inside mountain tunnels and across bridges.
As China's Ministry of Railways (MoR) requires the average speed of major national passenger railway trains to be at least 200 kilometers per hour, there is a need for higher quality telecom signals to ensure reliable access. The Fuzhou-Wenzhou high-speed railway is 320.97 kilometers in length, with a peak speed of 250 kilometers per hour.
The MoR plans to invest a total of RMB 1.3 trillion ($190.19 billion) towards the construction of railways throughout the country in 2009 and 2010, which will provide more opportunities for telecom equipment vendors to build railway communication networks.
The MoR estimated that by 2010, WCDMA signals will cover 30,000 kilometers and that by 2020, GSM signals will cover up to 100,000 kilometers of the national railway.
Huawei won the Fuzhou-Wenzhou high-speed railway network project at the end of June, and is currently competing with international equipment vendor Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) for additional railway communication projects.
-CG