London Underground

Overview

In July 2019 the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, announced 4G mobile connectivity would be introduced to the eastern section of the Jubilee line within the London Underground by the end of February 2020. This important project being part of a wider ambition of making London the world's leading 'smart city'.

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Having worked within the London Underground environment for over 25 years, when Capita were awarded the contract to design, install and maintain the solution to provide this service, they turned to the expertise of Installation Technology.

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The eastern section of the Jubilee line included platforms and tunnels between Westminster and Canning Town. Ticket halls and corridors within stations were also in scope with the exception of London Bridge and Waterloo stations where coverage ended at the platforms themselves.

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Approach

Our project teams worked closely with TfL, Capita and its partners to co-create a solution design that would deliver the immediate requirement for 4G, whilst implementing an infrastructure for future upgradeability to 5G. 

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In line with our ‘One Team’ ethos, we embedded our Project Management Office (PMO), consultants and engineers within the TfL project team workspace, to ensure close collaboration throughout the design and build phases. This ensured challenges were solved together, with lessons learnt shared and communicated across both teams which ensured efficient delivery and nurtured a positive working environment. 

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The London Underground is a highly restricted and tightly regulated ecosystem making it an extremely challenging environment in which to implement equipment. Only approved personnel are granted site access, all materials need to be fire tested, various permits need to be granted with approvals taking several weeks to be processed. Weeks can be lost in the schedule if any of these elements are not in place. 

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Adding to the challenge, much of the equipment needed to be implemented within the operational railway environment itself. Equipment that needed to be installed ‘track side’ could only be installed when trains were not in operation. With the Jubilee line operating weekdays and weekends this restricting delivery to just a 4-hour window each night. 

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With safety front of mind, we collaborated closely with TfL to create a Project Execution Plan (PEP) that would navigate these short installation windows and manage the delivery of 2 new Data Rooms, 6 ticket halls, 7 tunnel sections, 8 stations, dozens of walkways, escalators and stairwells within just 8 months. 

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Solution

We completed the installation of a 4G neutral host Digital Distributed Antenna System (DDAS) to deliver the coverage and capacity requirements of all four Mobile Network Operators in February 2020 as specified, on time and to budget.

The new data centre built at Canada Water 4 floors below ground, was a particularly demanding engineering challenge. Equipment and enclosures were lowered over 15 metres through an opening that needed to be cut into a reinforced concrete ceiling. 

Fibre optics to link the radio equipment was installed within the tunnel sections of the London Underground along with radiating cable to carry the mobile signal installed at window height to ensure the signal penetrated the carriages.

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• 46km of leady feeder (~35 metric tons)

• 35km of fibre optic cable

• 12km of Cat6a cable

• 15km of electrical cable

• 65 Low-power Remote Nodes (LRN)

• 70 High-power Remote Nodes (HRN)

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Shashi Verma, Chief Technology Officer at TfL, said: “This has been very complex work to install the necessary equipment to allow our customers to be able to get phone reception within our tunnels while keeping the stations open and operational.’’