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Huawei offers £50m London tube mobile network ‘gift’
CHINESE TELECOM VENDOR Huawei is looking to strike a deal with Transport for London to install a £50 million mobile network in the London Underground.
The phone network will be a £50 million 'gift', according to a report in the Sunday Times. Vodafone and O2 were mentioned as mobile networks that would pick up the bill for the installation work, while the Financial Times said Thales was also going to get involved, with the whole bill likely to cost more than £100 million.
The idea for a mobile network in the London Underground has been bandied about for many years, but the cost and difficulties in building it have always been too much of a hurdle. But London Mayor Boris Johnson made it a priority, fuelled by a desperation to make a good impression on the world in time for London Olympics 2012.
It might seem rather generous of Huawei, but it could be a good way for the company make a breakthrough into the UK market. The Chinese also have a sense of humour. "May you live in interesting times" is a famous Chinese curse, so remember that when you have people on either side of you talking loudly into their smartphones during a packed rush hour. µ
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I'm not much impressed by terrorists in general, but one thing they are good at is making explosive devices trigged by cell phones. As long as there was no reliable signal in the Tube, there was no danger of that particular approach to creating chaos.
Huawei wants to change that; I wonder why.
Even if this does go ahead and gets implemented, if their TalkTalk routers are anything to go by it won't work anyway.
The Chinese must have been quite surprised to learn that the London underground doesn't have mobile coverage already. When I was in Hong Kong in 1997 I could use my phone in all the MTR tunnels I went down. The UK may have led the world once in creating underground railways and other wonders of the modern age (and the train I was on in HK was actually built in England, but unlike London's trains it was clean and the announcements were intelligible) but the UK definitely lags behind much of Asia now.
Huawei ADSL routers have been standard TalkTalk issue for years...
Or this gives them a wondferful spying facility?