4G soon to arrive on London Underground
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5G might be the talk of the town, but London’s underground tube network is one of the few places in the city that any type of mobile signal is yet to penetrate. Passengers quickly log on to wireless at station stops to check emails and download content, but otherwise they are incommunicado.
This will slowly change as 4G is set to roll out on the tube network next year . The eastern half of the Jubilee line, between Westminster and Canning Town stations, will be the first to trial the 4G service in March 2020 and the plan is to have the infrastructure in place for the whole of the London Underground network to be 4G-ready by mid-2020.
Used by over five million passengers daily, the London Underground network is one of the world’s largest underground networks and getting the 4G infrastructure in place will involve installing more than 2,000 kilometers of cable.
Once the Jubilee line trial is complete, Transport for London (TFL) will award a contract to a mobile provider to deliver mobile coverage across the whole Underground network. The four short-listed bidders for this contract are Axia SC Consortium, BAI Communications, Cellnex UK Ltd and the Wireless Infrastructure Group. The winner of this contract is due to be announced in September 2020.
There are also plans to introduce 5G on the Underground in the future.
While good news for mobile operators, not all passengers will welcome mobile connectivity on the tube. It will likely raise the noise levels on the trains and end the one time in the day when they can truly switch off.
The purveyors of the burgeoning free magazines and newspapers distributed in station foyers will also be upset by the news, as it could mean a fall in take-up for their publications.
