Robert Sarfati

SYSTRA Consulting Services, France - Retired, Former Director Technologies and Services for Mobility

Robert has been the Chair of the Telecommunications Committee for Railway Communications (TC RT) for 21 years. The committee oversaw from 2001 onwards the development of ETSI standards in support of GSM-R and FRMCS. The work later expanded to the investigation and development of a common technical solution applicable to Urban Rail and coexisting with ITS in 2014. Robert initiated a key move of the rail sector from analogue telecommunications to the digital telecommunications world. Robert introduced and maintained a perfect complementarity between GSM-R Railway community (represented by the ‘Union Internationale des Chemins de Fer’ (UIC)) system requirements and the ETSI standards which provide the detailed standardised solutions. He was also one of the initiators of FRMCS, the 3GPP MCX-based system for which ETSI TC RT is currently developing ETSI standards as part of a European Commission standardisation request. FRMCS will be the successor to GSM-R and Robert was instrumental in obtaining additional frequency for this system.