A Techno-Economic Study for Seamless LTE Passenger Communication on Jakarta-Surabaya High Speed Train

The Jakarta–Surabaya high-speed train kept its passengers connected throughout the journey. This research aimed to design an LTE network with access points in train units, utilizing a decentralized MSC architecture, with two MSCs located at each end of the train route. Additionally, real-time mobile transmission was implemented using FO-RF systems. Technical evaluations showed that one-way transmission delays along the FO–RF path ranged between 50.17 ms and 60.23 ms, with round-trip delays consistently remaining below the LTE threshold of 150 ms. Furthermore, optimized intra-carriage forwarding delay for onboard users was around 8 ms, ensuring performance consistency across user experience. The optimizations within the network showcased measurable performance gains, as displayed by the improvements in throughput of 15.73%, RSRQ by 12.4%, and RSRP by 17.42%. Moreover, even in scenarios involving users with high mobility and dynamic movements, the user experience, along with QoS, improved substantially, with latency, jitter, and packet loss decreasing by 90.57%, 86.81%, and 74.19%, respectively. An economic assessment of the system revealed an NPV of IDR 333 billion, an IRR of 17.87%, and a payback period of under one year, implying feasibility. With the results from the assessment, it was inferred that the implementation of LTE FO-RF was beneficial from both a technical and economic perspective for Indonesia’s high-speed train communications infrastructure.