Services have now started on a new high-speed railway in Indonesia along the 142.3 kilometres between Indonesia’s capital Jakarta, and the popular tourist destination of Bandung.

The new railway, known as the WHOOSH, brings down the travel time between Jakarta and Bandung from 3.5 hours to just 40 minutes, which in turn will boost economic development along the route.

Signalling and communications for the line were built by Huawei in partnership with China Railway Signal & Communication (CRSC) and China Telecom.

Together they have built a dedicated railway network that provides real-time communications, as well as the control and dispatching of the trains. In practice, the reliable and robust technical support of the network will ensure intelligent, safe, and efficient train operations.

WHOOSH is both Indonesia’s and Southeast Asia’s first high-speed railway, with the trains running at 350 kilometres per hour. It is also the first project that China’s high-speed railway system, including all elements of the industry value chain, has been implemented outside of China.

The trains are equipped with the Chinese Train Control System Level 3 (CTCS-3), which was independently developed in China. A major factor in the system was the need to take into account the frequency and high-speed of the trains. Also, it was crucial that the train control system guarantees that the trains will run safely.

This was achieved with a stable and reliable dedicated communications network that provides high security, large bandwidth, and simple O&M. The data network uses Huawei’s next-generation data communications equipment that guarantees 100% secure networks through native hard pipes, whilst every link is protected by redundancy with a redundancy switchover time of just 35 milliseconds.

The transmission network uses Huawei’s Hybrid MSTP equipment that provides the large bandwidth and high stability needed by the over 20 high-speed train systems. These include scheduling and command, disaster prevention, video surveillance, passenger ticketing, and power telecontrol systems. The network has also been designed so that it can accommodate both growth and the requirements of future railway services.

According to Lai Chaosen, Vice President of Huawei Indonesia, the WHOOSH’s train-to-ground wireless network adopts Huawei’s mature solution and employs interleaving in networking for seamless coverage. By achieving up to 99.99% availability, the network ensures the stable transmission of train control signals and the intelligent orchestration and scheduling of train numbers and function numbers.

Liu Jieping, CRSC’s Deputy Chief Engineer of the Jakarta–Bandung Project, explained that the launch of the WHOOSH represents a major landmark in China’s going global strategy for high-speed railways. The train-to-ground wireless network, transmission network, data network, and other system solutions provided by Huawei have built a high-quality dedicated communications network for the WHOOSH and provided reliable technical support for safe and efficient train operations.

Dwiyana Slamet Riyadi, President Director of PT Kereta Cepat Indonesia China (KCIC), stated, “We would like to thank all stakeholders, especially Huawei and CRSC, for their contributions in preparing technology solutions and railway infrastructure that are instrumental in supporting the operation of the Whoosh high-speed train.

“The shared implementation of proven technology solutions and operational solutions of the Whoosh high-speed train can serve as a reference and benchmark for the development of other high-speed rail infrastructure in Indonesia and similar projects in other ASEAN countries.”