PaxLife and onway Combine to Win Northern Italian On-Train Systems Tender

PaxLife Innovations in Germany and Swiss-based onway, have jointly won the tender to supply an on-train WiFi and Infotainment System to Südtiroler Transportstrukturen AG (STA) in northern Italy. The pair emerged victorious in a public tender held by STA.

Under the terms of the deal, Paxlife and onway will operate and maintain the new on-board systems – including the routers, hotspot controllers, media servers and central management system - for a period of at least six years. The contact also has an option to extend this period. The system will be installed on 25 Stadler ETR 170 trains from three different generations. In addition, STA says it will add eight new Alstom trains to its fleet by the end of 2025.

Südtiroler Transportstrukturen AG, is a publicly owned company operating transport across the South Tyrol area of northern Italy. Officially known as the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, South Tyrol, is home to just over 530,00 inhabitants – the majority of whom speak German.

According to the winning bidders, their solution portfolio consists of onway’s basic infrastructure. This includes providing a high-performance vehicle-to-ground connection, the train hardware (router, server), and the CarlOS operating system to automatically distribute, operate and monitor applications across the entire fleet. Thanks to the open architecture, any applications – such as infotainment – can be easily added. In addition, onway says future applications including video surveillance, ticketing, passenger counting, etc. – can also be introduced.

For its part, PaxLife Innovations is supplying its infotainment system which is based on railSTACK, a CloudEgde platform. In addition to content management functions for regional and journey-specific content, this also provides a comprehensive display of passenger information content on vehicle screens and portals. Paxlife points out that its railSTACK-based structure can be used on any vehicle type (train, bus, mountain railway, etc.) and this it argues, will allow STA to have a centralised, cross-fleet control over displayed journey information formats and content.

The suppliers say that for the vhicle to ground connections, their system will use VPN connections that are automatically established via all available uplinks and bundled into a FatPipe. If the train is at a station, an additional VPN connection is automatically established via the station W-Lan and used as a further channel – to download large content.

On the ground side, onway’s data center will be responsible for all aspects of passenger Wifi. In addition to the redundant VPN gateways, this includes the equally redundant central hotspot controllers mpp, as well as the onway director – the management system for monitoring and managing all onway router and server components – used for administering and monitoring all internet accesses.

The value of the contract was not disclosed.

The growing market for passenger WiFi and on-board entertainment and trackside wireless systems will be the main subjects of BWCS’ WiFi on Trains Conference this year www.Traincomms.com .  

For information on speaking and exhibiting and the one remaining sponsorship spot at the 2023 event, please contact Ross.Parsons@BWCS.com

The 2023 Conference is sponsored by Huber+Suhner, GlobalReach Technology, Westermo, Xentrans and Icomera.