Tadiran Telecom, a supplier of IP business telephony and telecommunications solutions, has installed the first Softswitch communications solution for India’s South Central Railway.

 

South Central Railway is one of the 16 zones of the Indian Railway with its headquarters at Secunderabad. As part of its overall communications system modernization plan the railway selected Tadiran’s (News - Alert) Sea Softswitch to meet first-time requirements for redundancy, fault tolerance, central administration and billing.

 

Tadiran said its Sea Softswitch is essentially a communications services platform that provides powerful built-in and third party applications. Sea Softswitch supports a number of advanced applications, including voice and text messaging, video sessions and user presence, as well as a variety of other applications.

 

South Central Railways has stated that their modernization project is huge and includes the important Hubli and Vijayawada divisions, and spans 85 stations over 200 kilometers. It was BPL Telecom, Tadiran’s business partner in India who had recommended the Sea Softswitch for this project.

 

A cluster of three IP-based Sea Softswitch servers are to be at the core of the project, managing the entire communications system. One Softswitch server will be installed in three geographically dispersed sites and each of them will offer redundancy and fault tolerance for the other servers.

 

These Sea Softswitch servers will be responsible for highly dependable, cost-effective communications and also for maintaining and managing the other Tadiran’s solutions that are deployed for the modernization project. Those solutions include a FlexiCom 5000 system which functions as the main hub for trunks and connects to the other IP systems, ten IPx 500 units deployed at larger stations, and FXS/SIP boxes located in the smaller stations.

 

Tadiran Telecom has stated that it is involved in many railway projects around the world and they understand the specific communication needs of this market segment. For instance, the company has provided solutions for more than 200 systems and sites at Irish Rail, making it one of the largest private QSIG telephony networks in Europe.