Kapsch acquires NEC's railway business

System integrator and railway telecoms solutions provider Kapsch CarrierCom has acquired the rail communications business of NEC Portugal. Under the terms of the deal, Kapsch has also taken over all of NEC’s railway contracts. These contracts are with three rail operators in Portugal, and operators in Spain, Saudi Arabia and Finland.

Production of the terminal devices necessary to provide connectivity for railway communication will be transferred from Portugal to Kapsch’s home market, Austria. This means that all of Kapsch’s rail customers can now obtain the terminal devices required for GSM-R operation directly from the vendor.

“Our railway customers demand the highest reliability and performance from their communication systems. We can now meet these expectations with our own terminal devices that are perfectly optimised for our infrastructure components,” said Kari Kapsch, CEO of Kapsch CarrierCom.

“The devices in question are cab radios that consist of two components installed in the locomotives: a radio component and an operating device with display, called a Desktop Management Interface (DMI).”

He added that the devices produced by NEC feature integrated GPS, W-LAN support and the capacity for over the air software updates.