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Either ban mobiles on London's Underground, or enable them!

Radios underground are the "cornflakes moment" today: "the London Assembly committee report will highlight problems faced by staff trying to use radios underground." The story concerns a series of four bombs set off in London's Tube railway and bus network last year, and I'm still wondering why it's taking so darned long to getwireless underground.

At the time of the July bombings, I was indignant that the people who knew what was happening underground - the passengers on the trains - couldn't tell the rest of the world, because their mobile phones were dead.

It now appears from the  London Assembly report, due out shortly, that even if London's underground system had been Internet-enabled with mobile phone access, it would have done no good, because the mobile networks collapsed.

a BBC summary of the report: "Chairman of the committee, Richard Barnes, said it was unacceptable that, 18 years after the Kings Cross fire, rescue workers in the Tube could still not talk to people above ground."

We should name names. There are people (mostly, senior station managers) who have spent those eighteen years blocking progress in getting wireless underground, on the purely spurious grounds that "it might affect signalling."

It's time to put the onus on the signalling scaremongers to sort things out. There are two paths to go down. Either

There is simply no excuse for blundering on with a signalling system that "might not" survive the use of mobile phones. Anybody might accidentally switch on a mobile phone underground at any moment, and what then?

  Tags: Internet Underground, terrorism, mobile phones, and wireless