High speeds at high speed

E&T looks at the many ways in which the telecoms and transport industries are converging. Until a few years ago, most of the convergence between the world's transport and telecoms systems involved the use of a single communications technology per application: a radio link between aircraft and control tower; a broadcasting link between radio station and radio car; a global satellite navigation signal tracking the location of a ship; or an electric railway signal alerting train drivers about the status of the line ahead. A more recent trend has seen the design of transport applications that rely on a variety of communications techniques. The phenomenon is the result of the inevitable replication in the transport sector of the convergence that has occurred within the telecoms sector. Convergence in communications is happening on two fronts: at the network and the device levels. Those operators that used to provide phone services to residential and business customers now provide anything from Internet to fixed or mobile voice, mobile data, leased line, IT, network security, multichannel television or home networking services. And mobile phones that used one radio frequency to communicate with cellular base stations are now sophisticated handheld computers featuring several radios for multi-band cellular service, Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth access and GPS tracking, as well as USB connectors for the wired transfer of content.