A good read!
Wikipedia link for the leaky cables, because I thought that was interesting.
It is pretty great when it works.
While many newer underground railways have had mobile coverage in their tunnels for years...
This is news to me, I don't think I've seen it in any other city. But maybe I just haven't travelled enough
I'd even say most western European and other big country capitals have pretty good data coverage underground. Wikipedia lists Hong Kong, Delhi and Copenhagen as examples but I'm certain I've experienced it elsewhere.
Even in London where there are many no signal spots on the underground the data connection is better than some city centres and urban areas above ground just standing around on foot, like around the Brighton centre and Guildford edges.
Hasn’t China been able to do this for a while?
It's not hard when you build it all in from the start. The difficulty is retrofitting it into antique stations and tunnels.
I first stumbled upon network hotels and leaky cables topics somehow when I was reading about Kuala Lumpur, and subsequently Malaysia's MRT network there.
It's one thing that you can plan and build that network because it's new. It's another thing to retrofit it into existing infrastructure as the Underground.
A guy that did a wireless survey for my company told me about leaky cables, because they used it in large warehouses for their largest client.
It's an ingenious solution.
I wonder how they finance it. I guess the owner charges a fee to the mobile phone networks
It says early on in rhe article that they lease to the mobile networks. It also mentions the emergency network and that it's critical infrastructure so that lay two leaky cables for redundancy, this extra cost implies to me that the whole project likely has significant government funding. Plus they mention replacing staff radios, and there would be a big selling point for the underground itself having mobile coverage for customers, so I'm thinking they also would have provided funding.
"who’d a thunk it"
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