UK: London Underground delays mobile phone coverage plan in the Tube

London Underground has decided to delay a plan to run mobile phone coverage on the “Tube” (subway), apparently due to a lack of “credible proposals” from suppliers. Gadzooks, wonder what that could mean? Well read on and you shall find out!

There was supposed to be a trial last year, which interestingly would have been on the Waterloo and City line – this is the one that runs solely between Waterloo and Bank stations, and is actually unconnected to any other line – providing a perfect testbed.

However, neither the trial, nor any real services will be going ahead for now – providing coverage, like with all infrastructure deployments, has ended up being prohibitively expensive, due to the unique constraints of a tunnelled system. Having said all of this, other cities such as Beijing and Moscow do have network coverage underground – but I can only assume they figured a way to make the economics work for them.

Ho-hum – well no facebook updating or text messaging sending for the near future on the Tube then. I’ll just have to play an iPhone game instead

[Via: Cellular News]