The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Metro nears new deal for cell service throughout tunnel system

September 21, 2015 at 5:37 p.m. EDT
Commuters wait for their train at the L'Enfant Plaza Metro station in Washington. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

After years of stalled efforts to bring cell service to the subway, Metro said it has reached a new agreement with four major cellular carriers on a plan that would make it possible for riders to talk on their phones, send and receive e-mails and texts and surf the Web throughout the transit system’s 101 miles of tunnels by the end of the decade.

And because cell reception would become available progressively, as more and more cables are installed in the tunnels, commuters on some subway lines would be able to use their mobile devices on underground trains a lot sooner than 2020, Metro said.

The project was supposed to have been completed three years ago, under a 2008 contract between Metro and a consortium of Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile. But officials said several obstacles prevented the companies from wiring the tunnels, including unforeseen logistical hurdles, a bankruptcy and a deadly 2009 train crash, which forced Metro to give higher priority to safety-related infrastructure work in the system.

Now, under pressure from Congress to get the job done — and after a fatal incident Jan. 12 in which scores of riders were trapped and cut off from communication in a smoke-filled tunnel — Metro said it has “agreed in principle” to a new deal with the carriers, aimed at hastening the advent of digital data and phone gab in its subterranean cellular dark zone.

That would be no small technological advance in the nation’s capital, where many people feel hobbled in their professions without up-to-the-nanosecond information.

Sean Sorbie, for example: He works for the Democratic National Committee. He hates being five e-mails behind his colleagues by the time he gets to the office. So he applauded news that the beleaguered transit agency, plagued by chronic mechanical and performance woes, plans to revive a moribund project that has long seemed terminally fouled up.

“Who wants to be stressed out first thing in the morning?” said Sorbie, 30, as he waited for a train at Metro Center recently. It’s so unnerving, being below the streets and disconnected, however briefly, he said. “I’ll get to a meeting and someone will ask me a question that I don’t know the answer to.”

House members are getting increasingly agitated about Metro safety.

The original contract called for the four companies to install cell cables in the tunnels — but the project has been stuck in the mud almost from the outset and probably would have been delayed for many more months, officials said.

Instead, under a restructured agreement that the transit agency said it expects to finalize and announce within a few weeks, the consortium of carriers would pay Metro tens of millions of dollars and the agency would do the tunnel wiring itself, starting in January. Using equipment provided by the companies, Metro said, it hopes to finish outfitting all six subway lines for cell reception within five years.

“When we pull the cables through, as we go up the Red Line in the first segment of this, they can ‘light it up’ as they go along, as they say in the telecom business,” one Metro official said last week, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the deal is not formally in place yet. “So some people will get service much sooner than others. You don’t have to wait until everything’s done.”

The official chuckled. “That’s if it works the way it’s supposed to.”

Melanie Ortel, a Verizon official and spokeswoman for the consortium, had no comment on the plan beyond saying, “The four carriers continue to work with [Metro] to complete this important project.”

There’s no public timetable for when cell service would begin to be phased in. And considering Metro’s troubled performance record, some wonder whether the plan will come to fruition at all.

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), who has threatened to seek a reduction in federal funding for Metro if the cell service project is delayed much longer, said he was “satisfied” with the pending agreement. Yet he sounded less than fully confident that the transit agency can do the work successfully.

“There’s always a concern,” Mica said. “They have a history of problems with operations and administrating programs. So that gives me pause. But right now, if we can start moving forward, we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes.”

Metro spokesman Dan Stessel declined to specify the project’s cost, saying only that the four carriers would pay Metro well more than $10 million but “not north” of $100 million.

Phone service has long been available on Metro’s underground platforms (albeit with varying reliability). The carriers were able to accomplish that much under the initial deal, before the project bogged down. Commuters have learned to whip out their devices during station stops, to refresh, download and tap-tap-tap at the keys before the train lurches forward again into the cell-signal void.

Trundling beneath the city, alone with their thoughts, some riders welcome the quiet interlude — no incessant one-sided conversations going on around them, no cacophony of voices yapping with unseen bosses, co-workers, spouses or nannies.

To others, though, the digital isolation is frustrating.

“You can’t get a message out,” said Michael Knudsen, 27, who works in consulting. Standing at Metro Center, he said, “I was late for a meeting and couldn’t tell anyone.”

The federal Passenger Rail Investment and Improvement Act of 2008, which designated $1.5 billion in long-term funding for Metro and set deadlines for the transit authority to establish cell service throughout the nation’s second-busiest subway. Metro signed a contract with the four companies soon afterward.

Because the carriers stand to profit from increased cellphone use, they were supposed to have done the bulk of the heavy lifting, including cable installation, while Metro was to have had a smaller role, giving safety training to the carriers’ workers and escorting them in the tunnels. At the same time, the carriers were supposed to have installed additional tunnel wiring as part of a long-planned upgrade of Metro’s internal radio system.

The carriers met their first deadline, making cell service available in Metro’s 20 busiest underground stations by 2009. The remaining stations were wired later. But installing cellphone cables in the “challenging environment” of a rail tunnel proved to be a lot more problematic and time-consuming than the companies had anticipated, Metro said.

Then, on June 22, 2009, two Red Line trains crashed near the Fort Totten station, killing nine people. The National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated the crash, found numerous safety-related problems in the subway, requiring Metro to begin a massive, years-long overhaul of infrastructure.

Given the limited number of hours available for tunnel work while trains are diverted or the subway is closed, there was not enough time or room for the cable installers to stay on schedule while Metro crews labored in the tight spaces underground, the transit agency said. By the next deadline, in 2012, when the cable installation was supposed to have been finished, only small portions of a few tunnels had been wired.

In 2013, after the consortium’s prime contractor, Powerwave Technologies, went bankrupt, months of legal and financial wrangling ensued between the carriers and the failed company. By last fall, officials said, Metro knew that many more months were likely to pass before the carriers lined up a new prime contractor. So the transit agency and the consortium began hammering out a revised deal.

Meanwhile, another rail calamity occurred, on Jan. 12, when an electrical malfunction on tracks near the L’Enfant Plaza station filled a Yellow Line tunnel with smoke, engulfing a stalled train in noxious fumes. As choking passengers waited more than 30 minutes for help to arrive, many tried in vain to call loved ones or 911 on their mobile phones. Scores of riders were sickened, and one died of respiratory failure.

The L’Enfant smoke ordeal: Terrifying minutes on a Metro train.

“We had started to talk before that,” the Metro official said, referring to negotiations with the carriers on a restructured contract. “But clearly the January 12th incident, to say the least, put a lot of pressure on everybody to come to the table and get things done.”

Congress also turned up the heat, especially Mica, who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform subcommittee on transportation and public assets. At a July 21 hearing on transit safety, he had a testy exchange with Jack Requa, Metro’s interim general manager.

“The first thing we have to be concerned about,” Mica said, “is the thousands of people that are out there” using the subway. “Do we have an agreement with the cellular companies on how to do the installing in the tunnels?”

Requa said, “We’ve been negotiating —.”

But Mica cut him off.

“Do we have an agreement?” the chairman demanded.

“No,” Requa said.

Mica held up a copy of a letter, waving it at Requa.

"Not only did I write to you, we had a bunch of members write to you, asking — again — that we move forward with that," Mica said. ". . . I want an agreement. I'm really just tired of this. . . . I was in the cellular business. I'll go down there and connect the damn things." Then he smiled, acknowledging: "I don't know if I could do that. But I'm telling you, it isn't that complicated."

And he warned, “If we don’t get some agreement to get this done, get something in writing by the time I get back in September, I guarantee you the fur will fly.”

With a few relatively small contract details still to be worked out, the transit agency said, the agreement would make Metro, in effect, the consortium’s new prime contractor.

Officials said they think many of the earlier problems would be avoided because Metro crews have greater experience with tunnel projects and because scheduling blocks of time for the work would be easier to do in-house, without a big telecommunications contractor involved. Metro also would install its own new radio wires in the tunnels.

Mica, among others, will be watching closely.

“If they continue to have delays beyond this month, I have the support [in Congress] to take action against them,” he said Thursday. “If they can’t get it together, they will find that there are very direct and serious consequences.”