MTA To Announce Deal On Cell Service for Subway

More than two years after it first hatched plans to provide cell phone service on underground subway station platforms, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority today is expected to announce that it has reached a deal with a service provider to wire 277 subway stations over the next six years.

"It took Alexander Graham Bell less time to invent the telephone than it takes to install service in the subway system," Rep. Anthony Weiner, a Democrat of Brooklyn and Queens, said in an interview yesterday.

Six subway stations are scheduled to have cell phone reception within the next two years, elected officials said. The MTA has not yet chosen which subway stations will be the first to be wired, a transit authority spokesman, Charles Seaton, said.

The MTA received four bids from wireless providers in January 2006, but negotiations had stalled. For years, officials have been advocating for cell phone service underground as a safety issue.

"What they've decided to do is provide the Cadillac of service on six stations — my quibble is that we would should have had more stations getting emergency service quicker," Mr. Weiner said.

Cell phone service will be available only on station platforms, not in tunnels, under the agreement. In unscientific polls conducted by a transit advocacy group, the Straphangers Campaign, most riders said they would like to use their cell phones on subway platforms, the chief attorney for the Straphangers Campaign, Gene Russianoff, said. Wiring subway tunnels so that riders could chat aboard trains, however, was less popular. "It pits people who have legitimate concerns about security against people who say it's the only part of the day when they can read a book, and they resent hearing someone talk about what a swine their business partner is," Mr. Russianoff said.

While cell phones already ring at certain hot spots in stations and aboard moving trains, cell phone service has never been reliable underground.