Phone Service Feature

New York Subway System to Get Cellular Service; AT&T and T-Mobile to Benefit

By Susan J. Campbell, TMCnet Contributing Editor

If you are planning to use your cell phone in New York City subway stations, hopefully you are an AT&T or T-Mobile customer. According to a Bloomberg (News - Alert) report, both carriers have signed 10-year agreements to access an underground network that is being built by Transit Wireless LLC.

Both AT&T and T-Mobile (News - Alert) have the right to exercise an option to renew the contracts four times in increments of five years at each renewal. 

Transit Wireless announced in July that it had secured financing to build the network for New York’s 277 underground subway stations. The deal was able to breathe new life into a plan that has been delayed for about three years. 

The total project is expected to cost $150 million to $200 million to get all 277 stations wired within six years. Transit Wireless will pay New York City Transit $46.8 million over 10 years for the honor of managing the overall project. 

Initial deployments and a six station test area were put on hold when funding proved to be difficult to secure. The agreements with AT&T (News - Alert) and T-Mobile helped to spur interest and funding is now in place to move the project forward. 

The agreements will certainly help boost T-Mobile and AT&T in this area, although AT&T has enjoyed loyalty due to its exclusive offering of the iPhone (News - Alert). Sprint and Verizon are also power players within the city, but could be at a disadvantage when coverage is available underground by the other carriers. The network planned by Transit Wireless is expected to include WiFi (News - Alert) and may cover significantly more than just the stations as signal propagation could send both cellular and WiFi service through large sections of the tunnels. 

Transit Wireless has two years to install test coverage areas in six subway stations. Upon successful completion of this phase, the company will have another four years to complete the building and testing of the underground coverage networks across all 277 stations. 

One of the biggest questions being asked right now is whether or not this announcement will secure dominance for AT&T and T-Mobile in this market. AT&T has been hit hard with network issues in the metropolitan area, but a move to 4G could help broaden performance. This will be an exciting deployment to watch.

Susan J. Campbell is a contributing editor for TMCnet and has also written for eastbiz.com. To read more of Susan’s articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Tammy Wolf