Disconnected Underground 🚇
Toronto’s subway’s cellular blackout – it’s been ten years and commuters are still waiting.
Photo by Jenna Manhau
According to a study released in January 2022, 83% of Canadians own or lease a car. In 2021, 11 million Canadians commute to work by car either as a driver or passenger. Our high dependence on cars is the result of decades of government policy incentivizing suburban living and prioritizing private vehicles over other forms of mobility. Yet, for those who reside in the core of urban areas or cannot afford a car, public transit is still the major transportation they rely on for traveling.
I don’t spend much time commuting since I mostly work from home like the other 4.2 million Canadians, but I take buses, streetcars, or the subway operated by the Toronto public transit service agency – Toronto Transit Commission (TTC) whenever I need to travel. In most cases, I am content with TTC’s service, despite its occasional hiccups in the schedule and unstable streetcar or train frequency. But what’s inconceivable is that there is no cellular signal in the subway for many people.
What money can’t buy
Canada is a country with a high Internet penetration rate; Almost everyone is connected – 97% of the population has access to the Internet. However, our land is vast and most of the Canadian landscape is sparsely populated, only less than 30% of the geographic area is covered by major cellular carriers like Bell, Rogers, and TELUS. That means we have Internet, but it isn’t everywhere.
In spite of that, 90% of the big cities like Toronto are covered by most of the major carriers’ cellular data networks. Most of them are 4G networks or with higher Internet speeds, so accessing the Internet on mobile devices in core urban areas isn’t a problem, except for one place – the subway.
In Canada, we are paying an average of C$43.81 (USD 31.87) for a mobile plan with 5GB of monthly data and unlimited texting and calling. Although a report by the Canadian Radio – Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) showed a 10% decrease in the cost of mobile plans since 2019, what we are paying is still way higher than the global average of USD 3.12 per 1GB. This is a very high price. Are we asking too much if we want the service we pay for to be available underground where we spent much of our time during our commute?
“Freedom” in the subway
TTC does have the infrastructure we need for cellular signals in the subway. About 10 years ago, BAI Canada won a 25-year contract with a $25.5 million bid to install and operate the Wi-Fi and cellular network in Toronto’s subway system. They have been working on building the wireless network in the transit system since 2013 and completed the installation in 2017. The network in the stations and over 12 km of tunnels has been fully operational since 2018, and more antennas along subway tunnels were installed in 2019 to provide even better service.
After almost a decade of debate and bureaucracy, Freedom Mobile, a cellular carrier owned by Shaw Communications Inc., is the only carrier that signed on to BAI’s network. If you are a subscriber of any of the dominant carriers – Rogers, Bell, and TELUS, or carriers that are on the networks of these big 3 telecom companies (other companies pay these big three telcos to run their services on their network), you won’t get cellphone service in the subway even today.
While we are still questioning why we don’t get our cellular service underground, our close neighbor, New York City (NYC), has accomplished full cellular capacities with all four major carriers – AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, and Verizon Wireless, in all 281 city’s subway stations. By 2023, all of NYC’s subway tunnels will be wired for cell reception by Transit Wireless – a company majorly owned by BAI Communications.
On the other side of the globe, South Korea welcomed in-train 5G Wi-Fi Services in most of the major lines of Seoul’s subway network in February 2022. By harnessing 5G mmWave coverage and boosting mobile broadband capacity 10 times across the subway network with major Korean mobile network operators, passengers are now able to stream videos in 4K resolution with at least 700 Mbps on trains for free.
Toronto is a world-class city in many ways, but not having cellular service in the subway in the year 2022 just doesn’t add up to it.
The sacrifice
The licensed framework may work in other major cities in the world like Hong Kong and New York where the wireless networks within their public transit systems were also built by BAI, but such an approach had failed once in Montreal and in Toronto.
In 2020, The Société de Transport de Montréal (STM) announced the 4G LTE network is fully connected in all 68 subway stations and 71 km of tunnels. Props to this equally-funded project by Bell, Rogers, TELUS, and Videotron, there is finally some good news to consumers for once – Montreal now has “Canada’s largest indoor digital network and the longest underground wireless network in the country.” In fact, these four carriers gathered to negotiate for direct access to the network in STM after Extenet – A Chicago-based company ditched installing the infrastructure in Montreal after failing to sign on any of the 4 telcos operating in the Montreal area.
TELUS has no concrete plan for expanding its cellular service to Toronto’s subway system, but Bell and Rogers expressed their eagerness in serving their customers in TTC if they could run it on their own infrastructure. However, they have been denied access to do so. The incentives in our market are simply not enough to push these telecom giants to do better. Whether they expand the network to the subway or not, consumers would continue with whatever is available in the market without more competition. After all, none of these telcos are losing anything by not signing on with BAI nor continuing their negotiation with TTC to get their own networks set as Freedom Mobile remains a small player in the market with spotty coverage outside the subway systems.
Why should we care?
Just about two weeks ago from the time of writing (December 2022), a woman was dead after stabbing at TTC’s High Park station. With the increasing number of assaults in Toronto’s subway, public safety in TTC is being questioned. Enabling connectivity in the subway not only fulfills the basic functioning of our daily lives where connectivity is needed on demand, but also creates a sense of security for passengers.
TTC launched the TTC Safe app for passengers to report any suspicious activity or safety concerns in the subway, but the app does not summon emergency responders. If you ever encounter any emergency that requires police, fire, or medical assistance, you are expected to activate the emergency alarm on the trains. There are circumstances where this isn’t possible and it’s safer to dial 9-1-1 discreetly. Continuing to not have cellular service underground removes a useful tool in emergency situations.
Epilogue
A disconnected cellular network in Toronto’s subway system is just the tip of the iceberg. Uncompetitiveness in the telecom industry is one of the reasons for the current state of affairs. The recent Rogers-Shaw merger case is an example that exemplifies the deep-rooted problem. Whether the Competition Bureau managed to persuade the tribunal that the planned Freedom Mobile divestiture in the acquisition is insufficient to prevent the merger from substantially lessening competition is up in the air. If Rogers' $26-billion merger with Shaw goes through, it will reduce the big telecom giants from four to three, which put Canada’s already uncompetitive telecom landscape into a more dire state for consumers.
Unfairness might be inherent in the deal of granting over 20 years of access for BAI Canada, but simultaneously, these telcos are also taking advantage of their dominant power to manipulate the result by prioritizing their own benefits over public interests. Whichever is better for the telcos, consumers shouldn’t be the sacrifice of the battle between these oligopolists. Canada’s inaction is not only further risking the progress of underground connectivity, but the dynamism of a competitive environment.
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