“Most people will think of this as delivering a public Wi-Fi service. For us, that is just the tiny tip of the iceberg. What we are delivering is a flood-wired fibre backbone to all of our stations and that makes a dramatic difference to the service we can offer.”

A key lesson from the trial was that the quality of the user’s experience would be critical to the take-up of the Wi-Fi service. “You are in a station for about 10 minutes”, Mr Griffin explained. “If it takes you half of that time to get on to the network, to put your password in and all that stuff, forget it! No one is going to use it.

“So with the service we’ve delivered, you register once, you walk in, it recognizes you. If you are on a train, by the time the train has stopped, you’ve usually registered and can use the service. So you are downloading your emails even when you are on a train, station by station. That’s how fast it is.

“And in terms of speeds, we are delivering broadband capability that is usually better than people’s home broadband. That’s the kind of capacity that we felt we needed to deliver, to deliver a superb service.”

With the acceptance of a tender from Virgin Media, the roll-out proceeded rapidly, drawing on a range of standard installation plans to suit seven different types of station. The result is a carrier-class service delivered via a resilient fibre backbone throughout each station and multiple points of presence. Implementing the new concept of the IP station, this scheme enables almost any information service to be supported digitally, from CCTV feeds to station help points.

A clear opportunity

Already logging close to almost one million sessions each day, the Wi-Fi service has proved a big success with passengers – well beyond TfL’s expectations. But now TfL is looking ahead to further opportunities. “We are looking down tunnels for both (I think it’s fair to say) LTE and Wi-Fi”, Mr Griffin said. “And we are keen to expand what we’ve done up to the above-ground stations.

“The IP station is a clear opportunity. Things like condition monitoring, getting data off trains, communicating with future trains that may or may not have drivers on board. (If Boris [Johnson, Mayor of London]  has his way, definitely not!) And we’ve got further work to do, I think, in terms of business models, especially around LTE and working with the MNOs [mobile network operators].”

Answering questions, Steve Townsend explained that one of the factors which had earlier driven the public MNOs away from the Underground was in generating the radio-frequency power to drive the antennas. “Power into devices, it generates heat”, he said. “One of the biggest problems we have on the Underground is the generation of heat.” Wi-Fi, on the other hand, is a low-energy technology and generates very little heat.

Real-time vision

Also bringing enhanced communications technology to the Olympics were London’s famous red buses. Through the capital’s iBus project, one of the world’s largest automatic vehicle location projects, all 8000 of them now provide audible and visual ‘next stop’ and destination announcements for passengers, and their arrival is signalled by electronic ‘countdown’ information displays at principal bus stops.

Simon Reed, who, as head of the technical service group at TfL, was in charge of the project, told his audience that this information is also available now on passengers’ own mobile devices. “On any mobile device, if you go to tfl.gov.uk/buses, there is a real-time departures board for all of our services”, he said. “I will guarantee that it is right to within 90 seconds.

“For those of you who like doing text messages, for every one of our stops in London there is a single text number. You can fire in a stop number and get back the message in real-time. So we are trying to put the same data out there in as many different ways as possible so that people can use it. And all that data has been syndicated. There is an open interface that anybody can subscribe to, and that is now supporting 30-odd apps that are out there as well.

“That’s just some of the ways that we are trying to bring the vision of real-time information, whichever way you wish to consume it.”

Surging demand

At the 2012 Olympics, most of the games venues were located in the London area and served by the capital’s bus network (Mr Reed pointed out a contrast with the Beijing Olympics of 2008, whose equestrian events took place in Hong Kong, a four-hour flight away). London’s transport system proved well suited to hosting these, the first public transport games, and the record numbers of passengers they attracted.

“The network was really enhanced to cope with the extra demand”, Mr Reed said. An extra 200 buses were brought into London from around the UK – equivalent to 1½ times the fleet of a typical provincial operator – and a final dress-rehearsal was provided by the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee weekend two months previously. “We talked about between three and four million additional trips that went through. On a normal day there’s 12 million public transport trips which happen anyway, so you are talking about step change.”
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