Electronics Weekly
The news follows an initial deployment with Telefónica, which involved replacing legacy equipment with Cobham Wireless’ idDAS, and delivering 2G, 3G and 4G cellular coverage for passengers using Berlin’s underground rail route.
The project has now been expanded, with the technology providing 4G connectivity for subscribers of Vodafone and Deutsche Telekom.
idDAS is digital and scalable. It’s required to provide high data throughput and capacity to support the hundreds of millions of passengers who use the U-Bahn every year.
The digital solution reduces the number of base stations required, and due to its cascading remote unit infrastructure, requires minimal hardware and fibre. Cobham says idDAS provides a cost-effective and energy efficient solution with maximum resilience and minimal signal loss.
The system is planned to cover the entire Berlin U-Bahn upon completion. The wholly digital architecture is accompanied by Cobham Wireless’ active element manager, an operations and support centre that facilitates system upgrades and network configuration changes. 4G coverage is currently available on almost half of the U-Bahn network, with other areas being phased in over the coming months.
The project follows global DAS deployments across underground transport routes. At present, Cobham says its equipment is in use in more than 70% of the metros worldwide.
“Connecting underground routes comes with its own set of unique challenges, including limited physical space to house hardware. However, the BTS hotel concept means we’ve been able to locate these outside of the U-Bahn in a separate technical room, from which capacity can be directed to the metro,” says Ingo Flömer, CTO, sales, marketing and business development.
