After years of planning, the MTA has taken another step forward in its quest to bring wireless Internet access to hundreds of thousands of daily commuters who use the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North. On Friday afternoon, the agency published a request for proposals (PDF) asking for wireless carriers to submit their plans for installing and operating a wifi system along the commuter rail lines. This move comes slightly over seven months after the MTA issued an RFEI for the project, but despite, according to The Post, looking to get a network off the ground before the end of the year, the MTA faces some high hurdles yet.
The RFP itself is fairly straightforward. The MTA is looking for a company to install and manage a wifi network that would reach all stations and trains that run along the Metro-North and Long Island Rail Road routes. Additionally, the authority is requesting plans to wire Penn Station and Grand Central Terminal as well. The network must also coexist peacefully with the MTA’s own radio-based operations and with Amtrak’s wireless access points as well. It must be able to support the bandwidth demands of every person who wants to use it, and it must also come with a guarantee of on-time installation and service activation.
If those demands — fairly typical in an RFP — weren’t enough, the MTA has requested that the network be installed at no cost at all to the cash-strapped authority. Considering that the MTA is allowing potential providers to determine whether or not they would charge for the service, by foisting installation costs onto the provider, the MTA is nearly guaranteeing that wireless service will not be free. Meanwhile, as Wi-Fi Net News points out, this proposal comes with a host of other problems. Glenn Fleishman, who doesn’t expect the MTA to receive a single response to this RFP, writes:
The MTA wants a service provider who would operate a network to bear all the expense of installation and operation (including railroad labor costs for same), provide 24×7 customer support, and uninterrupted service. But the proposal is pretty muddled. While digital advertising (changeable signs on board trains and at stations) should be part of a bidder’s thinking to minimize the cost in installing such systems, there’s no spec for those systems. A bidder can build a bid partly around offering such services. The MTA also likes bids in which the authority shares in revenue.
I don’t see how this could fly. No sensible firm would propose taking on all this expense without any assurance of revenue beyond the public Wi-Fi side of the system. Despite the large number of passengers, many of those most likely to pay already have 3G service on smartphones or through laptop cards. There’s no operational services component, and that should be the baseline for any new rail RFP of the last five years…The system described would likely cost many tens of millions of dollars to build to the specifications that the MTA is requiring, without any substantial potential to reclaim that as revenue.
The MTA expects all proposals in by close-of-business on May 17, but as Fleishman does, I too have a hard believing a reliable company will step up to the plate. The RFP discusses the numerous infrastructure issues surrounding installation, and if the MTA wants uninterrupted service from New York to Montauk or the far reaches of Orange and Rockland Counties, these plans simply seem untenable. “Because of the complexity of the system, including overhead catenary electrical systems, buried lines, protected watershed and River view sheds, new WiFi infrastructure/towers along the right of way may prove to be very difficult to approve or implement,” the document says of the Metro-North territories, “so alternative approaches should be considered to make the system operable.”
I’ve long urged the MTA to explore a wireless solution for its commuter rail lines. After all, commuters could become quite efficient if they have uninterrupted high-speed Internet access during long commuters. Yet, with such high demands and high costs associated with installation, this RFP may very well be the closest the MTA comes to a wireless solution for the foreseeable future.
7 comments
With a deadline of May 17, 2 months away, the MTA almost seems to be putting this out there with the intention of it to fail. It looks like hey want to appear to be making an effort to meet the political pressures, so as to appease powerful interests in Albany and Washington, who they need to cough up cash to cover this budget shortfall, while not actually spending any money. If someone does successfully bid on it, that’s a plus, but if it fails, they can just say that no one wanted to provide the service and it’s not the MTA’s fault. It’s a classic bureaucracy shell game.
Why not provide 24/7 commuter rail To and from the city instead of Wi-Fi on the train… Could care less if i can brows the web entering a city with wi-fi all over and thanks to Cablevision the suburbs pretty much have wi-fi all over as long as you have an Optimum account.
I can’t take this seriously until the MTA embraces “You Tube,” as they’d have you believe it’s called on their front page blurb.
Bad enough people chat on the mobile’s about nothing the entire time a train is above gorund. Now, you’ll be able to switch to Skype underground to perpetuate senselessness.
I hope that the subway NEVER gets wifi or wireless service underground. It is the last sanctuary from the insanity.
I ride the Metro North Danbury line. The line was electrified between roughly 1923 and 1961. They’ve been “studying” the possibility of re-electifying the line for at least a decade. I’m not holding my breath for either electric trains on the branch or wi-fi.
I was thinking, wow, that would be amazing, and so appropriate for our futuristic times, but then I agree with AI D. we’d lose our last sane hiding place. and we’ll stop looking around, observing all the interesting events and people underground. We’ll lose the last chance of any contact on the train.like in this post. http://bit.ly/aM6DvJ
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