Pierre Tane, the UIC Head of Digital Architecture, was recently appointed Chairman of ETSI TC RT (Technical Committee Rail Telecommunications). He succeeds Robert Sarfati, who has been pioneering and supporting the GSM-R system’s development around the world for decades. The Technical Committee Rail Telecommunications is responsible for developing and maintaining standards related to GSM-R, creating a collective technical solution for urban rail and ITS in the 5 GHz frequency band, as well as developing technical specifications in support of FRMCS (Future Railway Mobile Communication System).
With an engineering degree in computer science & applied mathematics (ENSEEIHT, Toulouse, France), Pierre Tane has been personally involved in standardisation for more than 15 years, through direct and indirect participation in multiple international standards organisations (ETSI, 3GPP, OMA, OASIS, IETF, TMF), in product / network architecture and solution design. He started working for railway telecommunications in 2003, first for GSM-R and then later for FRMCS in several different roles (regulation, system architecture, pre-sales / post-sales, …).
He had held various positions at Nortel Networks, Kapsch CarrierCom and Kontron Transportation before joining UIC in March 2021.
He is part of several UIC working groups, such as FRMCS, UGFA (Group for Frequency Aspects) who are responsible for the expected needs for spectrum, particularly sensitive in the transition scenarios, ATWG (the FRMCS Architecture and Technology Group Working Group) whose mission is to define targeted architectures, to evaluate candidate technologies, and so on. He also participates in European research programmes (Shift2Rail, ERJU, …).
UIC has been developing the successful GSM-R standard in coordination with ETSI. ETSI telecommunications expertise will also be central for developing the standards required to design FRMCS by complementing the FRMCS specification documents.
During his mandate, Mr Tane will bring his expertise in international standardisation, telecommunications and knowledge of the railway domain to TC-RT. He will lead the standardisation efforts required to support the ongoing maintenance needs for the GSM-R standards, drive the development of the FRMCS standard building blocks and, in general, promote open standards in service to the rail transport sector.
