London mayor wants mobile access on Underground before 2012 Olympics

"I'm on the tube!"

London Mayor Boris Johnson wants to see mobile access on the London tube network before the 2012 Olympics, according to a Sunday Telegraph report.

Johnson has asked five mobile operators - 3 UK, O2, Orange, T-Mobile and Vodafone - to pool financial and technical resources for a London Underground (LU) radio access network (RAN).

The RAN would see coverage enabled by transmitters and receivers positioned on tube tunnel roofs, with antennas deployed on the ends of each carriage.

Each carriage would become a mobile phone microcell, with voice and data backhauled out of the tube network with standard network cabling attached to the radio base stations.

Johnson is also trying to get Eurostar to enable mobile phone access on its services.

Enabling such coverage on the tube could cost "hundreds of millions of pounds", and this isn't the first time mobile phone access on the Underground has been mooted.

In 2007, Transport for London put out a tender for a six-month mobile phone trial for Bank and Waterloo, but the trial didn't happen and plans to roll out mobile access were shelved in 2009 after supplier proposals were deemed "not commercially viable".

At the time LU strategy and service development director Richard Parry said: "LU recognise that there is now growing demand for mobile coverage to be extended to deep-level sections of the tube."

However, elsewhere mobile access has been successfully rolled out. In 2008, Glasgow's Subway system was enabled for mobile phone access.