AI-driven network fuels massive Australian freight rail project

A new head office for the Inland Rail project in Brisbane was to be a flexible workplace, with the ability to reserve a desk at a moment’s notice.

“We sought a modern, best-practice-based wireless deployment to support the agile ways of working that Inland Rail was moving toward,” says Brad Henshaw, network architect at Australian Rail Track Corporation, which is delivering Inland Rail in partnership with the private sector.

One requirement was a Wi-Fi network that could securely connect the desk displays and other IoT devices that were part of the desk booking system, visitor registration system, and digital signage.

“We need to isolate untrusted network devices so that all of the desk reservation, signage, and conferencing/room control devices are in secure zones,” says Henshaw. “With Juniper wireless, that was easy to do.” 

The first 100-kilometer section of the 1,700-kilometer alignment was completed in 2020. At the head office in Brisbane, teams engage in everything from mapping the geography and engineering the rail line to project management, marketing, and legal. As staff and partners collaborate, they can be confident they’ll have an exceptional network experience.

Inland Rail’s ICT group also can be confident that the wireless is secure. “Juniper wireless provides useful security controls to restrict untrusted devices and help mitigate our IoT security risk,” says Henshaw.

With the multiple pre-shared key functionality in Juniper wireless, IoT devices can access the Wi-Fi without a common key. “We’re securing IoT with novel security methods and it worked the first time,” he says.

Henshaw is creating office-in-a-box kits with Juniper High-Performance Access Points and Juniper Mist Edge for temporary locations and remote offices.

“We can utilize Mist Edge to deploy Juniper Access Points to our remote sites and securely connect IoT devices by tunneling back to our data centers in Brisbane, where additional security controls are in place,” says Henshaw. “Mist Edge allows us to take our security model and extend it over our existing WAN.”