After a long road, free Wi-Fi service is now available at every single TTC subway station.
BAI Canada — the company that won the 20-year, $25 million contract to outfit the Toronto Transit Comission (TTC) with Wi-Fi — announced the news on Wednesday afternoon. The company started building out the infrastructure to provide TTC stations with Wi-Fi and cellular service in late 2013.
Earlier this week, York Mills station in North York became the last station to come online with Wi-Fi service.
The company also announced that Freedom Mobile cellular service is currently available at 53 stations. BAI Canada and Freedom Mobile expect to complete the rollout of station cellular service by this November. Both Freedom’s AWS-1 and AWS-3 networks are fully compatible with BAI Canada’s underground infrastructure, meaning Freedom Mobile subscribers with Band 66-compatible devices can use their data buckets at LTE speeds while at one of the 53 cellular-ready stations.
BAI Canada has started to wire the subway system’s tunnels for cellular service.
What’s more, BAI Canada has started to wire the subway system’s tunnels for cellular service. Tunnel cellular service is currently available between Bloor-Yonge and King stations. The company is working towards wiring all the tunnels in the downtown loop. Once the Spadina extension opens later this year, all 18km of tunnel connecting Sheppard West and Vaughan Metropolitan Centre stations will have cellular service (all seven stations will have both Wi-Fi and cellular service as well).
BAI Canada has also started prototyping systems that will allow it to turn TTC subway trains into mobile Wi-Fi hotspots, but it does not currently have a time table for when it expects to have Wi-Fi service inside of the city’s subway tunnels.
According to BAI Canada, its T-Connect Wi-Fi network sees more than 130,000 logins each weekday. The company says that’s a 44 percent increase since January 2017.
In a phone interview with MobileSyrup, Ken Ranger, CEO of BAI Canada, said, he’s “pleased with [the company’s] progress.” MobileSyrup interviewed Ranger as part of a larger feature on BAI Canada’s efforts to build Wi-Fi and cellular connectivity into Toronto’s transit underground in May 2016.
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