Kazakhstan's Railway Giant KTZ Accelerates Digital Transformation with Huawei
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Kazakhstan Temir Zholy (KTZ) is a transport and logistics holding company, an operator of the mainline railway network in the Republic of Kazakhstan, and a national railway carrier of goods and passengers. With a rail gauge of 1520 mm, Kazakhstan ranks third among the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and the Baltic States.
Leveraging 16 junctions, KTZ enables economic connections across 14 regions and 3 cities of national significance in Kazakhstan, as well as 5 neighboring countries. In terms of freight turnover, KTZ is one of the 15 largest railway companies in the world.
In recent years, as digital technologies continue to develop, all industries are actively exploring the road to digital transformation, which has become an engine for them to improve efficiency and upgrade operations. As important national transportation enterprises, railway companies are also actively promoting digital transformation to improve operation efficiency, optimize service quality, and enhance customer experience. All in all, digital transformation is an inevitable trend for railway companies. With the help of Huawei's digital technologies, KTZ puts in place ICT-based, intelligent, and automated processes for railway transportation, thereby improving transportation efficiency, reducing costs, and optimizing service quality.
The legacy network facilities have become a key obstacle to KTZ's digital transformation process. Key challenges that KTZ faces include the following:
• Network devices running on the live network for many years are outdated. As a result, the network between stations suffers frequent interruptions, in turn affecting communication efficiency and leading to poor railway operational efficiency.
• No network management system (NMS) is available for localized devices, which makes unified O&M difficult. A large number of O&M personnel are required to maintain the network devices at each station. In addition, locating network faults is labor- and time-consuming. All of this leads to high maintenance costs.
• Wireless network coverage and signals at stations are poor, and insufficient bandwidth cannot support audio and video services, resulting in poor user experience.
For these reasons, KTZ urgently needed to quickly improve network coverage and optimize wired and wireless network quality.
Huawei has a wealth of industry-leading Wi-Fi 6 technologies and extensive experience in wireless campus network deployment and O&M. Leveraging Huawei's strengths, KTZ builds complete wireless network coverage for its railway stations that enables efficient wireless office for employees while delivering a fresh-new wireless network experience to its passengers.
• Wireless access anytime, anywhere: Huawei AirEngine Wi-Fi 6 products have industry-leading performance and unique advantages in complex station environments. Specifically, 3D network planning can be performed based on the station requirements (wall thickness and floor height), to visually preview overall performance and design the best network deployment locations. Doing so minimizes interference while maximizing wireless quality. Furthermore, AI roaming enables users to access the high-speed network anytime, anywhere. In this way, users can enjoy seamless and always-on high-speed wireless experiences even while walking around.
Unique smart antenna technology: Huawei APs use built-in directional antennas to accurately control signal coverage, which reduces interference and increases user concurrency to 50%. In densely populated station scenarios, Huawei APs enable massive user access. In particular, Huawei's smart antenna technology expands the signal coverage range by 20%.
KTZ intelligently steers its network traffic by choosing Huawei's SD-WAN solution that stands out with the following features:
• Simplified deployment: Huawei's SD-WAN solution provides various Zero-Touch Provisioning (ZTP) deployment methods to enable plug-and-play devices without onsite visits, reducing the deployment time to just minutes.
• End-to-end security: Integral to Huawei's SD-WAN solution, devices support IPsec on all links to achieve robust security and trustworthiness and ensure company-wide network information security. All services are encrypted while being transmitted, laying a secure foundation for railway information.
• Open Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for easy integration with third-party applications: Huawei's SD-WAN solution provides general-purpose APIs to integrate with third-party applications of today and tomorrow. Due to such easy integration, Huawei helps KTZ develop a smart railway operation management platform, on which railway information is visualized on one screen and railway tasks are intelligently scheduled, taking railway operation efficiency to new levels.
With the support of Huawei iMaster NCE-Campus, KTZ can manage devices on the entire network in a unified manner. It can also monitor the network based on each site, application, and user, display the status of the entire network in real time, and quickly demarcate faulty devices when a fault occurs, implementing minute-level fault locating.
In the past, network devices at each station were inspected one by one. Now, only one computer is required to view the network-wide running status and quickly locate faults. With iMaster NCE-Campus, users enjoy unprecedented intelligence and convenience.
Huawei iMaster NCE-Campus is also AI-powered and becomes smarter through frequent use. It can proactively predict faults, identify 90% potential issues, and offer effective rectification suggestions. In general, iMaster NCE-Campus turbocharges KTZ's intelligent transformation, reduces O&M workload, and improves network O&M efficiency.
KTZ achieves intelligent upgrade through the three-step strategy — digital infrastructure, digital services, and AI-based railways. In the future, KTZ will innovate further with Huawei to develop AI-based services — such as predictive maintenance, smart stations, and intelligent O&M, on the basis of digital and cloud-based infrastructure and services. Plus, KTZ will team up with Huawei to launch the digital talent cultivation program, including key measures such as OpenLab construction, joint design, and solution verification, through which KTZ can progress steadily on the road to intelligent transformation.