Plans afoot for mobile phone signals to reach metro someday
Oh, the inconvenience of modern conveniences! Riding the Warsaw metro can be a frustrating experience for mobile phone users.
You may be underground for only a few minutes or riding all the way from forested Kabaty in southern Warsaw to Centrum in downtown Warsaw. Regardless, for the duration of your travel, the yards of concrete, steel and earth between you and the world above leave little or no hope of getting a proper signal to and from your mobile phone.
And while the signal may be better in some parts of the 13.7-kilometer-long line, it's normally a safe bet that you are not going to be able to use your mobile phone on the metro. "Of course it bothers me," Karolina Leszczewicz, a student and mobile phone owner, said at the Pole Mokotowskie metro station while waiting for a northbound train.
The metro's administration has faced pressure from passengers to provide cellular calling capacity. Currently, the underground carries from 150,000 to 160,000 passengers per weekday, and roughly half that number on weekends. And Polska Telefonia Cyfrowa (PTC), which operates the Era GSM network, has received a number of inquiries on mobile phone usage in the metro, said Robert Niczewski, spokesman for the service provider. "There is demand (for mobile phone service) everywhere," said Leszek Kaminski, press spokesman for Polkomtel, which runs the Plus GSM service. "But it is not especially great. They (customers) have not been calling and demanding it."
This inconvenience in the lives of Warsaw's mobile users could be resolved within the year. Poland's three cellular services Era GSM, Plus GSM and Idea (operated by PTK Centertel) have joined efforts to make it possible to use mobile phones in the metro. In fact, a contract between Metro Warszawskie and the three providers could be signed within the next few weeks.
"We are very advanced in preparation of the contract," said Stefan Awietjan, chief specialist on commercial programs for Metro Warszawskie. "We want to enable our customers to use phones almost anywhere," Niczewski concurred.
Talks with the three companies have been going on for the past couple of years, said Teresa Kuzminska, spokeswoman for Metro Warszawskie. "Everything depends on the decision of the Metro," Niczewski said. The main issue in negotiations between Metro administration and the mobile phone operators at the moment is cable installation. But neither Niczewski nor Metro authorities would elaborate further. "The metro is very complicated by its very nature," said Kaminski at Polkomtel.
According to Awietjan, the first stage of making cellular telephony possible in the metro will be installing transmitters at stations. A "pilot" program should make calling to and from the Centrum station possible within the year.
"I think it's a question of months," before calling will become possible at the Centrum station, said Kaminski. The Politechnika and Pole Mokotowskie stations will be next, but it is unclear how quickly they will be ready. "It depends on the result of the pilot program," Awietjan said. But mobile phone service providers, operating for profit, cited a different determining factor: "It depends on how pressing it will be from the marketing point of view," Polkomtel's Kaminski said.
Both Metro administration and the three GSM providers appear optimistic about the plan. Besides making signals accessible on underground station platforms, the task includes hanging signal-emitting cables along tunnel walls, which will allow uninterrupted phone use on the trains themselves. Modest though it is by international standards, bringing Warsaw's metro system into the nearly ubiquitous cellular network of the world above will take around three years, Awietjan said.
Awietjan could not say specifically what sort of financial investment the project will require. "It all is the part of the capital investment on the side of the (phone service) operators," he said. Participation from Metro's side would primarily entail providing space for base stations (to transmit and receive) at the stations and eventually hanging cables in the tunnels.
Niczewski also declined to comment on the project's cost, but Kaminski did note that costs would be evenly split between the three cellular service providers. Polkomtel intends to invest about zl. 900 million ($219.5 million) this year, but the costs of installing equipment in the metro should be only a small part of this, he said.
Warsaw's will certainly not be the world's first metro system to allow passengers to use mobile phones underground. Stockholm's T-Bana is expected to have such service on its 110-kilometer system by the end of the year. Berlin's U-Bahn is now totally covered. Several stations on the Prague Metro already have transmitting capacity.
Metro Warszawskie authorities are aware that some passengers will object to the proliferation of mobile phones. London Underground Limited, for example, has set aside ?1.2 billion to install an underground communications system for administrative and maintenance purposes which could accommodate mobile phone users in the city's subway system.
However, Underground officials did not see cellular telephony for passengers as something happening in the near future. "(Passengers) are seeing this as a potential nightmare," said Neal Byrne, press spokesman for London Transport. "The tube is the last place where you can't use them."
But Kaminski played down any passenger objections that might arise on the Warsaw metro. "You can always find people who are against people speaking," he said.
