This time, if Metro succeeds in its long-troubled, now-revived plan to bring cell service to subway tunnels, Red Line commuters will be the first ones able to chat on smartphones, send and receive emails and texts, and surf the Web while riding underground, according to the transit official in charge of the project.
Kevin J. Borek, the agency’s chief of information technology, added that passengers everywhere in Metro’s 100-plus miles of tunnels should have cell service within five years. “And we’re hoping for better than that,” he said in an interview.
A week after Metro announced the resurrection of an eight-year-old project that fell dormant long ago and seemed terminally fouled up, Borek voiced optimism about its future, saying that Metro this summer will announce “a rollout” timetable for making cell service available along the subterranean stretches of all six rail lines.
He also discussed the tangled evolution of a project that initially had been a sweet deal for Metro, with a consortium of four cellular carriers agreeing in 2008 to pay for and oversee the installation of cell cables throughout the tunnel network. At the same time, at almost no cost to Metro, the carriers were to have installed miles of radio cables, allowing the agency to upgrade its emergency communications system.
Now, under the new plan, Metro will string the cell and radio cables along its tunnel walls and will pay a “vast majority” of the estimated $120 million cost, Metro General Manager Paul J. Wiedefeld said. He said the consortium of four carriers — Verizon, Sprint, AT&T and T-Mobile — will foot only a small fraction of the bill.
“I think it’s safe to say that we would not ever get cell service in our tunnels if we hadn’t decided to do it in this fashion,” Borek said.
The plan is for cell service to become available progressively. “It’s going to come up in sections,” Borek said. “The Red Line is first. . . . Right now, we’re testing various cables. We’re going through the exercise of hanging them and validating them.”
“The test sections that are being built now, between Glenmont and Silver Spring, assuming they function appropriately,” he said, would be the first “to become part of a live service.”
As for when that will happen, Metro isn’t far enough along in its work to set a date, Borek said, adding, “In June or July, we’re going to have a rollout plan.”
While the project has been largely marked by failure from its early years, it also appears to be the most ambitious of its kind in the nation in terms of tunnel miles.
To varying degrees, and under differing financial arrangements, cell service has become available over the past decade in subway tunnels in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago and Philadelphia. But those transit systems have far fewer miles of tunnels than Metro. In Atlanta, which has about 10 miles of tunnels, cell service “is something we’ve been working on,” a transit spokesman said.
In New York, the only city in the country with more miles of subway tunnels than the Washington area, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Authority said the agency is almost finished bringing cell service to its 191 underground stations. The spokesman, Kevin Ortiz, said the MTA has not announced plans for wiring its tunnels.
Under Metro’s 2008 deal with the cellular companies, pre-dating Borek’s tenure at the agency, the carriers seemed eager to string the tunnel cell cables and begin profiting from hundreds of thousands of commuters using the subway each workday. The consortium farmed out the installation work to a contractor, Powerwave Technologies, and was ready to pay the entire cost, probably well into eight figures.
As a bonus for Metro, Borek said, “since they were hanging one cable on the walls for their system, they were also going to hang a cable on the walls for the eventual replacement of our radio system.” Having new radio cables installed in the early years of the deal would have been beneficial for Metro because the agency had begun envisioning an overhaul of its emergency communications system, Borek said.
“The context of the deal in the long run was, we were a landlord,” he said. The four carriers “were going to come in and provide their service. And every year, they would pay us rent” for the tunnel space occupied by the cell cables.
But the plan fell apart.
“I don’t think the carriers really appreciated the limited work efficiency you can gain underground,” Borek said. Given the relatively few labor hours available each day or night while trains are diverted or the subway is closed, and considering how long it takes to move work equipment in and out of tunnels, Borek said, “for every 10 hours that you’re down there, you get maybe three hours of productive activity.”
Then, in 2009, one Red Line train slammed into another near the Fort Totten Metro station, killing nine people. The disaster exposed significant safety problems in the subway, forcing Metro to start making major infrastructure improvements. That work was given priority over cable installation within the tight space and time available in the tunnels.
The carriers met their first deadline, providing cell service in Metro’s 20 busiest underground stations by 2009. The other subterranean stations were wired for cell service eventually. But only small portions of a few tunnels were wired before Powerwave Technologies went bankrupt in 2013 and the project ground to a halt.
A federal law enacted in 2008, which designated $1.5 billion in long-term funding for Metro, requires the agency to establish cell service throughout the subway and also upgrade the radio system, Metro spokesman Dan Stessel said.
Last year brought new urgency to the project.
On Jan. 12, 2015, an electrical malfunction on tracks near the L’Enfant Plaza station filled a tunnel with smoke, engulfing a stalled train in noxious fumes. Riders tried frantically, and in vain, to call loved ones or 911, and rescuers underground struggled to communicate with the surface via a faulty radio system. Trapped for more than a half hour, scores of passengers were sickened and one later died of respiratory failure.
Over the years, meanwhile, the cellular business has changed greatly.
The nation is saturated with smartphones today, and the industry’s growth potential is being intensely questioned. As with other carriers, the four in the consortium are under pressure to maintain high profitability, a problem complicated by the entry, or possible entry, of new competitors in the wireless field.
While Metro and the four carriers were negotiating last year over how to restart the project, Borek said, “they basically told us, ‘Gee, we originally budgeted a certain amount of money for this’ — they never actually told us how much that was, by the way — and they said, ‘We’ve expended a majority of that, and we really only have a certain amount of money we could allocate to the completion of the project.’ ”
In other words, they were no longer willing to foot the bill or even a big part of it. Instead, Metro contractors will install the cables at the transit agency’s expense, although the four carriers, as originally agreed, will pay rent for the wall space.
A spokeswoman for the carriers, Kate Jay of Verizon, declined to comment on financial aspects of the project, saying, “We do not release capital or contract details.”
Referring to the 2008 contract, Borek said: “Metro saw the deal we struck with the carriers as essentially an opportunity to get this work done for free, on the cellular system as well as the radio system. But we can’t get it for free anymore.”
On Feb. 24, in announcing the restart of the work, Metro emphasized the necessity of getting the job done, regardless of who pays, and stressed that upgrading the radio system will be critical for emergency first responders.
Cell service also has become more than a luxury, Borek said.
After the L’Enfant Plaza smoke incident, he said, “there was a large public outcry with respect to the inability to use 911 in the tunnels, the inability to use cellphones. And that’s not only from a convenience perspective, but from a public-safety perspective.”
