One and a half years ago I wrote a blog post about the growing pains of taking the Paris metro and accessing the Internet over the 2G network that just couldn't absorb the load anymore. At the time I noted that there were talks between the metro and one of the French network operators to deploy 3G and LTE in the metro. Sadly enough it still hasn't happened one and a half years later and the 2G network now just fails completely for Internet access. A sad state of affairs. How long do I have to wait before coming back and being positively surprised?
But to end this post with a positive note I'd like to add that outside the metro, using 3G has become a lot simpler from an international roaming point of view now because European roaming data rates of my home network operator have reached a level where day to day web browsing on the mobile and some data from the notebook is affordable enough so I don't have to ration things quite that strictly anymore. Good!
Same thing in the Berlin U-Bahn: no UMTS/LTE in sight, EDGE completely overloaded. Operators say it’s too expensive to upgrade their installations…
Here in Sofia’s metro we have UMTS, but I suppose it’s because it’s a new project and the metro system is small – only 2 lines, criss-crossing the city.
I guess for cities as large as Paris and Berlin it’s too expensive, as Tobias said.
Hi!
But then, those cities are a lot bigger, with more people using the
metros and bigger telecom operators with a larger customer base. So that
should not be the problem. Otherwise, China would not have mobile
networks as it is much bigger than most other countries.
Cheers,
Martin