How London cracked mobile phone coverage on the Underground
ianvisits.co.uk
ianvisits.co.uk
> It turns out the phone signal inside the station can be better than the one above ground
I was surprised when I noticed I had 5G in the tunnel, ran a speed test and hit 641Mbps down!
I'd say it's developing-world tier, but a lot of the developing world has really good 5G signal these days.
First I went to one of the local town planning meetings in my area when they were rolling out FTTC. This one was due to a rather old person objecting to the placement of a streetside box which was not even outside her property and no one who it would have affected could see it or cared about it. I raised my objections about her being a NIMBY old fart and was asked to leave. She single-handedly blocked it for 5 years due to council connections. She dropped dead. Stuck on 20 meg ADSL until that happened.
Second, they built a 5g mast put didn't put any equipment in it and left it 3 months. Several local threads on Facebook from the tweakers about how it was causing all sorts of completely unrelated problems from tinnitus to covid to mind control. Then someone burned it. There is still no equipment in the cabinet or mast today, nearly 4 years on. No one got 5g.
Reminds me of this infamous decade-old story:
https://web.archive.org/web/20161010203002/http://mybroadban...
Log your activity, or lack thereof, meticulously. Perhaps a critical part was back-ordered, or more expensive than expected, and note in the log how it still hasn't arrived so you still aren't able to operate. If complaints come in, get them to be maximally public about it, ideally in a town meeting or something, then whip out your logbook and coup-fourré. Let the wackos show themselves to be wackos, then quietly start operating some time later.
(Chaotic lawfully :D)
Except in the good old days things just got done when there was demand for them and NIMBYs were told to fuck off.
They also have a much bigger population using exclusively mobiles rather than landlines, since their infrastructure developed when the former was already available, and it's cheaper to just put up a few towers than run one landline to each subscriber.
(Circumstantial evidence is that a particularly extra nice part of central London has no tube station, ostensibly to keep the riff-raff out, and is the only area with a proposed station on Crossrail 2 that voted against having a new station!)
Hundreds of years ago, before the rail or underground network, you still needed plenty of working class to live near where the rich people lived as the rich people still needed shops, servants, etc.
Having the city split into individual boroughs means that each borough had to provide for the full economic spectrum. The really expensive boroughs still have plenty of social housing and arbitrary divisions of land mean that things but up against each other from different boroughs.
However, new developments don't always get it right, when big green-field or brown-field sites are converted to residential they often struggle to get the correct right, and you end up with bigger areas that only cater for a subset.
National planning laws are also circumvented or gamed. If a new site requires a certain percent of "affordable housing" the developers will often agree (with the local borouhgh/council) to roll that over with another couple of projects and then build most of the "affordable housing" all in one place, and the diversity of individual areas is diminished.
As you say, there are plenty of other places in the world where this is the case, most of them in countries/cities that have existed for hundreds or thousands of years.
Not particularly true.
Go to a city in the world that REALLY has "never been planned", then come back and tell me London hasn't. ;)
Imagine living somewhere that people who work service or retail jobs (or nursing or teaching or all manner of underpaid but essential professions) can also afford to live!
It also means that local services can't be compartmentalised so that only rich people get decent services.
For example, southwark uses the same police force to cover the southbank (cultural centre) the £5m apartment blocks, as well as the shithole council estates (well they aren't shitholes anymore.)
TLDR: you don't get no-go areas.
I have a couple of the 4G-to-wifi bridges they used for the Free Wifi project during the Olympics kicking around somewhere, including the one they used for the promo photos. A friend of mine fitted them in the run-up to the Olympics, and the promo one had been sprayed in beautiful deep blue metallic paint with the logo stuck on.
He got given it to fit on a lamp post in a fairly posh London suburb, but the photographer couldn't come out so it was up there for about a week. When he came to remove it about half a dozen angry locals came up, complaining about the "microwave radiation was making them ill" and the "constant humming from it kept them awake at night", kind of thing, all the stuff they'd been ranting to the local fish-and-chips wrapper about.
"Oh, really? It's been affecting your health that badly?"
"Yes", they all replied, "we're getting a solicitor to take up our case, we're suing over it!"
"Oh," he said, opening the case he'd just taken down to reveal that it was completely empty. "Well, you're going to absolutely hate it when I put one up that's actually got the electronics inside then."
Going from £70/mo for gigabit to £65/mo for 500mb is insulting.
Sounds like they haven't changed !
I recall helping out a friend to review a Hyperoptic proposal for their development.
Hyperoptic's idea of "optic" was fibre to a switch in the basement and then unshielded CAT5e to the users premises.
If that wasn't bad enough, even to the untrained eye, you did not need a measuring tape to see they would have exceeded the CAT length limit by quite some margin for many of the users.
And that's before their claims of owning the external fibre when in reality they were just contracting an ethernet service from BT.
So yeah, I would not touch Hyperoptic with a bargepole. I suspect the other altnets are no better .... "sell, build, disappear off to the sunset" was the impression I got.
Reading some of the reviews on the internet about post-sales support I'm not surprised in the slightest that users often struggle to get support once the salesdroid has long departed their doorstep.
If Hyperoptic (or someone else like Community Fibre or The 4th Utility, etc) are in an area then OpenReach will put that area nearer to the bottom of their todo list.
It's better if they concentrate on putting fibre into areas that still have 7Mbps wet string DSL than competing in an area that already has one or more Gbps fibre options.
Even then, OpenReach tend to do FTTC first. Then it's case of what the last mile is formed of:
If it's via telephone poles then they get the fibre concentrators installed on the poles (which involves digging up the roads to get fibre to the poles) and then they're ready for the individual fibre runs to each property as and when they want to be connected.
You can see the differences in Google Streetview images in a residential road like: https://maps.app.goo.gl/RK8J8TXZUY6iF3pTA where the the June 2024 images show the fibre concentrators at the top of the pole, and then going back to the 2015 images or before where they aren't present.
If the last mile is underground then the fibre concentrators have to be installed in the service ducts (it's easier for them to deploy fibre alongside their existing copper pairs) and the last 5-50 yards to the actual premises is an absolute lottery, especially as many house redevelopments bury existing underground cables under concrete and other structures and twist/kink things in a way that copper is fine to deal with but there's little chance you can run anything else through whatever conduit is there, let alone something without corners too tight for fibre.
Compare the above overhead wiring fun with a street such as: https://maps.app.goo.gl/oDchjxtaoxPD5Pe86 where there are no telephone poles.
It was actually a worst case scenario, because FTTC often actually gives you a sub-optimal point to build out full fibre from, because you need way more cabinets to get decent copper speeds than you need optical splitters if you’re going to a passive optical network, so just building a decently optimised PON network is much cheaper than doing FTTC and then transferring to full fibre.
Called Comcast. Sent a team out. Told me it would be $69,000 installation then minimum $800/month for gigabit. Complained up the chain. They sent another team out and apologized and told me the first team made a mistake on the price. The install would actually be $71,000.
AT&T was the only other wired option. Best they could offer was 1.5Mbps.
Ended up with a T-Mobile 5G router that gave us a solid 800Mbps down.
If you're in a busy car enough people will hear it to be aware, and if you're on your own you will hear the announcement clearly.
Besides it's really a one in 10 million chance you'll get stabbed on the metro, not worth worrying about. The chance of getting hit by a car in traffic is much higher. That feeling of always being in some kind of danger seems to be very American, I never really see that in people here in Europe. I think it's the sensationalism in the press there, every little incident is blown up to massive "BREAKING NEWS!" proportions.
Also: generalising about Europeans is quite ignorant. As is ignoring recent data and recent risks and just citing long term data to insinuate people are being hysterical
Imagine trying to live your life where other people’s desires by default overrode you own.
Unfortunately that happens a lot; it's called the government.
It's about acknowledging it's a shared resource and respecting the space. No loud noises, no littering, no being drunk etc
These days people act like they're the only ones travelling
In classic British style they just try to influence and nudge people with campaigns and posters. That way the organisation doesn't have to deal with awkward accusations of racism etc
Don't be a douche.
It would be really annoying if I were out of touch for the whole duration of subway trips. But in my city it works great. Here the 3 main providers pooled together and shared the installation.
An annoyingly large number of them send audio messages. It’s worse for everyone involved.
It is noticeable on buses and overground when people play things out load, but to be honest quite rare in the grand scheme of things.
Never been happier.
The clincher was noticing that the drivers themselves had access to ear defenders ... TFL said that that's because they're down there for extended periods of time. Sounds reasonable but I'm not buying that as a way out of not fixing the issue and exposing my ears to the worst bits of the tube.
Also has the ancillary benefits of blocking out those rare times (for me) when people do have their phone on speaker or are having a chat I'm uninterested in.
Sorry, nonsense. I use the tube several times a day and it's a real rarity.
I do worry about the tube becoming a cacophony of phone calls, but really? Everyone message now anyway so I reckon that'll be a rarity too.
but, if I was mayor, I would be getting the transport police to have a word with phones on speakers.
I mean it depends on the line. Old northernline == 80db.
Elizabeth line, much quieter, so you're gonna hear it more
I don’t see the issue.
Public transport is far better today than it was 30 years ago, annoyances are far less than they were.
One exception.
Give me the Routemaster bus back.
The real ones, not the Boris ones.
Those who know, know. ;)
The only benefit was the ability to jump on and off away from bus stops. If you had any kind of mobility issue they were awful, and even if you didn’t they were still far more camped than a modern bus.
It’s not just Gen Z either, I’ve seen a few boomers do it and even a couple of millennials.
In the EU we have psd2 mandating a second factor. Usually an app where the transaction has to be confirmed.
Apple Pay on mac is the best we got. Looking forward to getting a new mac this year in part just for that.
https://www.boldyn.com/us/news/at-t-and-boldyn-networks-brin...
https://www.engagingwithcommunications.com/publications/THG_...
I’m not sure about the privacy implications of this whole setup. It’s basically turned the underground into a surveillance dragnet that can hoover up all sorts of interesting metadata… hostnames, hardware identifiers, traveling patterns, DNS queries, SNI requests… and an untold amount of unencrypted communications across weird protocols and devices..
So the ESN in the tunnels runs at 400 MHz, far lower than the 700 to 3,600 MHz range usually used by smartphones.
It's worth noting that 450MHz was listed as one of the GSM bands, but apparently was never used: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GSM_frequency_bands#GSM-450
Edit: ah I see why, this is exclusively about the Emergency Services network, not for regular phones.
In that sense it seems a bit similar to GSM-R used by the railways here.
It's specified for 4G/LTE (Band 31, 72 & 73) and 5G (Band n31 & n72) as well! The bandwidth is pretty low though at just 5 MHz, but it's used for special purpose stuff like electricity meters. I'm not aware of any consumer devices that use this frequency.
As late as 2018, the classic century-old system, with two bare wires on insulators on the tunnel walls, was still maintained.[2] Clipping a telephone handset to the two wires would connect to a dispatcher, and the wires were placed so that reaching out of the driver's cab to do this was possible. In addition, squeezing the wires together by hand would trip a relay and cut traction power. Is that still operational? The 2011 replacement was ISDN.
[1] https://www.thalesgroup.com/en/news-centre/press-releases/th...
[2] https://www.railengineer.co.uk/communications-on-the-central...
The challenge isn’t the technology but rather the environment you’re trying to retrofit
Please expand…
The recently built lines had 5G etc from the start. It’s not difficult when the environment isn’t constraining you. Even malls add indoor 5g these days
Because of that they rely on directional antennas that cover sections of the tunnel - but those need to be straight, otherwise another antenna is required to cover that corner. There is also very little head-room in the tube tunnels in London. You can see how things get more and more complicated as you dig deeper into the problem.
That it took 20-30 years longer than everyone else is through absolute incompetence and mismanagement. It would have been in place at least 10 years ago if they hadn't screwed up the RFP that Huawei won.
And it's not even shared infra! Vodafone is WAY behind the other networks.
I have worked with these things. There's no valid excuse for being 20-30 years behind on this.
And it's still not landed! By the time it finally gets to all stations I wouldn't be surprised if it's 40-50 years behind everyone else.
It wasn't enough to be cost-neutral it had to make them money.
In any case, as I said I have actual expertise in this area, and exactly none of being 20-50 years late has any technical reasons. I'm not surprised if there the layers of incompetence go deeper and include what you said.
The content doesn't feel AI generated, but maybe it is? I read somewhere that short paragraphs is an AI signature!?
With the old WiFi networks (Virgin, Vodafone WiFi, etc.), yes.
With the new 4G+5G coverage, you can access that the same as you access above ground coverage.
I had a fun situation when I had friends visiting me in Japan for a road trip. One friend's US-model Android phone didn't support the specific low bands used for sparse coverage in rural Japan, but the repeaters inside of the tunnels were all on standard 2100 MHz, so whenever we drove through a tunnel he rushed to his phone to get some messages through. Kind of the opposite to what you usually experience with loss of signal in tunnels :)
But this is a lot better for tourists who need the internet to navigate underground. So I’m pleased for them.
(This will change when they are done with Sofia station, a new station in Stockholm that they are building 100 m below the surface.)
Not exactly sure how they do it, but you could use phones on trains, last century.
Yes Japan has the best mobile wireless coverage bar none, but not everywhere.
Based on my experiences there's significant blind spot of mobile wireless coverage along the way from Fukuoka station to Iizuka.
Thanks to the OP excellent article.
Stockholm has had 3g in the entire subway system since 2005. Which has then been continuously upgraded. With some very deep lines.
I find that interesting. Another fascinating rabbit hole the article has sent me down is that there is an unused station called north end. I've been down that stretch before and i had no idea. Does anyone know if passengers can see it?
I found the coordinates on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_End_tube_station (the link is up in the top right above the photo).
Doesn't appear on this list though (unless it had another name): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_and_unopened_Lo...
This doesn't seem correct - cell towers don't just transmit a location that phones then pickup and use? Unless this is some emergency specific feature I'm not aware of?
I think it works like this: Towers transmit location. If the phone has no other source of location data, it'll fall back to "probably within radio range of this only tower I can hear"
It takes roughly 100us for light to travel 30km – Can you explain how the speed of light is relevant here?