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• Japan’s Sumitomo Corporation has formed a consortium with 33 railway operators to develop railway-operator solutions leveraging local 5G and AI, with demonstration trials and development having begun in 2022.

• As of January 2026, the solution is being trial-operated with multiple railway operators, with commercialization targeted for 2026. The plan is to offer the solution to railway operators as a subscription-based service, covering everything from communications infrastructure deployment and operation to AI applications.

• Service scope: The service enables multiple operators to share a local 5G core as the communications infrastructure, along with AI applications for digital transformation, the underlying cloud-based platform, and the operational framework. AI development resources and training data will also be shared among participating operators.

When each railway operator independently deploys an on-premises local 5G network and introduces AI servers within its own railway network (local 5G base stations, core network, and AI servers), this leads to high upfront deployment costs and inefficiencies in AI training.

Both local 5G and AI often become major barriers in terms of deployment and operational costs. This challenge is even more pronounced for regional railway operators, which typically have more limited financial resources compared to urban rail operators.

Large-scale data collection and training are required to enhance the precision of AI detection. The tracks of each railway operator share the same components, such as rails, sleepers, and ballast. By sharing and learning from data collected across all operators, the AI model can be rapidly advanced, significantly improving anomaly detection accuracy.

Sharing a 5G Core among multiple railway operators significantly reduces the cost of deploying local 5G networks at each operator's stations and premises.