Reliable wireless internet availability has become a vital part of our lifes. People are used in being online all the time; at home, in the office, at shopping centers or restaurants and even during commuting – being online and having access to personal information feeds is expected during the whole day.

Westermo has a long history in designing and delivering IEEE 802.11 technology based products for railway industry and its applications. Westermo onboard Wi-Fi products enable innovative real-time solutions for internet access, travel information, security and entertainment.

Connectivity on board

Onboard connectivity is becoming very important factor for the users choosing travel by public transport. This connectivity is already offering true value adding services for passangers such as onboard media services, for example Live TV broadcast or real time journey information for the passengers.

Also the operations and the maintenance are benefiting the available Wi-FI network. A real-time access to databases enables better customer journey and allows uploading of datas that can be used also for example for predictive maintenance needs.

Many current public Wi-Fi network solutions are not designed for high density applications with multiple users and other wireless networks such as train-to-ground (LTE, WLAN) nearby. Westermo's high density Wi-Fi products solves these problems.

Key Features

• Provides high-speed Wi-Fi coverage cloud on a train
• 1 or 2 Access Point  in each carriage
• Easy to install: Access Points can be powered by PoE – a small single antenna for dual band use
• Real user data rates up to 1500Mbps in each carriage
• Multi User MIMO allows even more clients to be served simultaneously
• Concurrent operation in 2.4 and / or 5 GHz channels
• Multi-SSID and VLAN support
• Intelligent client steering and airtime fairness
• Advanced encryptions (WPA2-PSK, 802.1x)
• Supports 5GHz DFS Outdoor frequencies as well
• Extended Service Set (ESS)

Many current onboard Wi-Fi solutions are based on older 802.11ac generation products that do not support Multi-User MIMO. Multiple 3rd party clients are connected to each access point, and if there are too many of them connected at the same access point, problems arise. The high data rates cannot be efficiently utilized because of this. The users can be only served one after each other. The current systems try to operate on 80MHz channels but they end up reserving this whole band just for the connectivity management overhead.

Current solutions show very high data rates (3×3 MIMO) on paper, but these rates are not supported by most of the mobile devices, they support only rates with 1 or 2 antennas (1×1, 2×2 MIMO).

From regulatory perspective train is considered outdoors, even inside the carriages. And as 802.11ac is only supporting 5GHz and does not support 2.4GHz it means that the products have to support DFS / radar requirements. Current solutions have problems to distinguish between real radar pulses and other interfering signal. This means that other users or interferences are detected as radar. Each false detection causes at least one minute operational break many times per day in each access point. To overcome this problem some might be tempted to switch off the DFS functionality and would be therefore operating illegally.

Westermo provides MU-MIMO

Westermo's solution consist of 802.11ac Wave2 access point with Multi-User MIMO support. This solutions allows more clients to be served by a signle access point – the Wi-Fi users can be efficiently served with the highest data rates. 

Additionally Westermo's solution does not try to use 80MHz bandwidth (BW) in each AP, but each of the multiple AP’s are operating with 20/40MHz BW. This is more efficient and robustthan a single AP with 80MHz BW as it provides the solution for interference and client overhead problem.

In congested high density enviroment a small channel BW is the way to go. Through these smaller channels Westermo's solution enables serving multiple clients with 1×1 or 2×2 MU-MIMO simultaneously.

Our solution also supports 2.4GHz operations and reliable radar detection with dynamic frequency management enabling legal use of outdoor 5GHz frequencies.

And it is easy to install

Westermo's small Access Point comes optionally with especially designed small dual-band MU-MIMO antenna. The APs can be powered by PoE and therefore require only one ethernet cable to be installed.