RFP for New York Subway Cell Phone Service
From CommsDesign:
New York this week started seeking bids to extend cellular phone service to its subway system...
[A]ll four national cellular operators -- Cingular, Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile -- are among the vendors considering submitting bids for a system that will provide service in 277 or New York's 468 subway stations. The bids are due October 12.
The Request for Proposals (RFP) was released earlier in the week, on the same day that the city announced it had awarded a $212 million contract for an electronic surveillance system in subway stations....
The RFP indicates that subscribers of all wireless carriers should be able to use the system, the newspaper reported.
Clyde Haberman doesn't like the idea:
But life is now about to change in an important respect. In the name of security, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority will install equipment to make cellphone service possible on scores of subway stations, 277 in all.
Say goodbye to some of the last refuges from the endless, witless yakking on cellphones that is epidemic in this city.
The terrorists can thus claim a success. They will have made it easier than ever for New Yorkers to drive one another crazy. All too many of them, you may have noticed, are not noted for restraint....
Ah, but this is an essential security measure, we are told.
Never mind that cellphones can be used to detonate bombs, as may have been the case in the commuter-train atrocity that killed 191 people in Madrid last year. Never mind that in a crisis, so many people will reach for cellphones that they will overload the system and render it useless. That is what happened on Sept. 11, 2001.
Never mind, too, that subway platforms have pay phones that can be used in an emergency. True, many don't work....
Oddly, a transportation authority spokesman said just last month that there were no plans to create this kind of cellphone capacity because "the cost is prohibitive." Someone must have ordered up a new cost analysis.
Along with the phones, the subways are supposed to get about 1,000 surveillance cameras. Those intrusive devices may be seen as another reason to chalk one up for the terrorists. But there is a difference. While many riders embrace the relief from cellphone abuse that they find underground, few have any expectation of privacy on a platform or a train....
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