Cellular coverage for Tube stations shelved

THE PLAN to enable mobile phones to work on London's underground railway network (aka The Tube) has been quietly shelved according to Martin Cassidy, president of Innovawireless.

Cassidy pitched his previous company's - Zinwave's - wares to Transport for London but found that the body expected suppliers to bear the brunt of financing the project.

As Cassidy's colleague, Daniel Lewing, pointed out, it is extremely difficult to work on the underground network. He reckons that you've only got two hours max overnight to get things done.

That might explain why the INQ can find no evidence of mobile phones having worked on the Waterloo and Bank stations last month (April) as originally promised for trial purposes.

When the INQ last mentioned this subject, iwe were inundated with messages from dwellers living in other capital cities where their mobile phones worked well underground.

Cassidy has left Zinwave to set up a new venture, Innovawireless, which sells products very similar to those offered by Zinwave.

These are hubs that utilise just one sort of antenna to pump a variety of mobile signals around a building. The list includes everything from Wi-fi (802.11 a/b/g) to cellular (GSM, CDMA, TDMA) and 3G (W-CDMA). The hubs are made by Mobileaccess.

Now that London's got a new mayor, in Boris Bimbo Johnson, maybe the project will be revived. Sadly, the INQ never read his manifesto to know his views on mobile phones. µ

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