WiFi Rail Inc. and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) have reached a 20-year deal to provide high speed mobile Wi-Fi access throughout the BART transit system and on all BART commuter trains.
Four downtown San Francisco stations and some segments of the tunnels are already fully functional, and have been providing premium service free to subscribers for the past year. The WiFi Rail deployment on the BART system will become the largest high bandwidth mobile Internet LAN in the United States cheap bounce houses. Completion of network construction is planned for the end of 2010.
The WiFi Rail network has demonstrated consistent speeds capable of providing video to and from the train, Internet VPN, VOIP, train telemetry and a host of other applications that a giant wireless LAN can offer. During the year of testing, more than 15,000 consumers registered and used the system more than 85,000 times, including live streaming video from the trains, proving the utility of the network. Tests on trains moving at over 81 MPH have consistently demonstrated upload and download speeds in excess of 15Mbps.
The WiFi Rail network design can be expanded to provide a parallel network capable of a wide variety of network functions to support public safety and security needs, including those of Homeland Security, according to the company. Other transit operations, such as customer information services, and customer train car telemetry applications for maintenance management can be expanded through the network deployment.
Wi-Fi Rail, based in Gold River, Calif., was founded in 2005 with specific focus on providing high-speed broadband service on commuter rail lines.