May 26, 2008, 8:48 PM — The San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District is negotiating with a startup
for a Wi-Fi network that would provide fast Internet access to riders throughout
its 104-mile (167 kilometers) regional rail system.
BART would not pay anything for the network, which would be paid for by rider
subscriptions and advertising, according to Wi-Fi Rail, a company based near
Sacramento that says it has four patents pending on its Wi-Fi technology for
predetermined paths such as railways and roads.
Municipal wireless networks have had a hard time financially, but public transit
offers a daily captive audience that is growing as gasoline prices rise. Wi-Fi
Rail estimates that within three years, as many as 20 percent of BART's 180,000
regular riders will subscribe to the service, according to Michael Cromar, chief
financial officer of Wi-Fi Rail.
Wi-Fi Rail has been testing the system for about a year on a stretch of track
in downtown San Francisco as well as on an outdoor test track. More than 9,000
people have signed up to use the system and have signed on more than 42,000
times, Cromar said.
Now BART and the company are in negotiations on the terms of a full deployment,
in phases, which would take as much as two years. On Thursday, BART staff presented
an update at a meeting of the transit system's board of directors.
Unlike other, established Wi-Fi providers, Wi-Fi Rail was willing to build
the network, for an estimated US$20 million, at no cost to BART, the agency
said. Like Sprint Nextel, which operates cellular base stations along a busy
stretch of track in San Francisco, Wi-Fi Rail will have to offer wholesale capacity
to other service providers to resell, said BART spokesman Linton Johnson.
The transit agency will use the wireless bandwidth to set up its in-car security
cameras for live viewing, and it plans to also put screens in cars that give
service information to riders, he said. BART would also receive a licensing
fee from Wi-Fi Rail.
Riders will be able to use the service free with commercials that pop up every
few minutes or buy a monthly subscription, Cromar said. The monthly fee would
be competitive with other hot-spot services that are priced between about $20
and $30, according to Cromar. Daily and other types of subscriptions would also
be offered. For that, subscribers would share between 15M bps (bits per second)
and 22M bps -- both upstream and downstream -- with other riders in a car. Tests
have shown no noticeable slowdown between one and eight riders on a car, he
said earlier this year. In tests, the system worked on trains moving as fast
as 65 miles per hour.
Riders will connect directly to a standard Cisco Systems access point on each
car, which in turn will link up to the trackside network. Underground, that
system will use deliberately unshielded coaxial cable, called "leaky coax,"
and outdoor sections of the track will be served using solar-powered parabolic
antennas.
Neither side estimated how long negotiations for the full buildout would take.
But once talks are concluded, the first phase of the network should be finished
and paid commercial service launched in about four months, according to Cromar.
