Skip to main content

Eurotunnel offers mobile telephony in Channel Tunnel

Eurotunnel and the British mobile telephone operators EE and Vodafone have signed a ten year agreement to offer mobile services in the Channel Tunnel. Customers of both operators will have access to 2G and 3G services in the UK to France north tunnel (UK to France). Both EE and Vodafone intend to offer 4G data services throughout the tunnel in the future. This will enable passengers of both Le Shuttle and high speed passenger trains to use their mobile phone or tablet device at any point of the journe
January 9, 2014 Read time: 2 mins
Eurotunnel and the British mobile telephone operators EE and 813 Vodafone have signed a ten year agreement to offer mobile services in the Channel Tunnel.  Customers of both operators will have access to 2G and 3G services in the UK to France north tunnel (UK to France).  Both EE and Vodafone intend to offer 4G data services throughout the tunnel in the future.
 
This will enable passengers of both Le Shuttle and high speed passenger trains to use their mobile phone or tablet device at any point of the journey through the Channel Tunnel. The quality of communication will be equivalent to a call made in Paris, London or anywhere above ground.

The news was confirmed and welcomed today by 7510 Axell Wireless, the British company providing the technology using a fibre optic Distributed Antenna System (DAS) to propagate mobile signals, both voice and data, throughout the tunnel.

Ian Brown, CEO of Axell Wireless explained: “Cellular connections in rail transportation are the future. Wireless coverage is the fourth utility – people expect it as a given, wherever they are.”

Related Content

  • October 2, 2013
    Cellular coverage on trains to get boost
    According to Ingo Flomer, director of Product Management of UK company Axell Wireless, UK transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin’s intention to upgrade the rail network to enable passengers to access high-speed mobile broadband does not go far enough to promote an integrated communications infrastructure that supports cellular (3G and 4G) coverage on-board trains. Flomer says the UK has significant technological hurdles to overcome to connect rail passengers to the cellular network. The coverage would ha
  • May 19, 2017
    Trials of new technologies to counter age-old work zone challenges
    New solutions are being used to improve the management and safety of work zones on roads both big and small, as Jon Masters discovers. The UK government has recently been going to some lengths to paint a picture of a nation embracing a future of digital technology – understandably given the economic concerns arising from exiting the European Union. In December last year, however, the UK National Infrastructure Commission (NIC) put down a somewhat different marker for where the UK is now in terms of mobile c
  • January 23, 2012
    Future traffic management needs new thinking, new technology
    One of the biggest problems facing US ITS professionals, says Georgia DOT's Hugh Colton, is the constrained thinking which is sometimes forced upon those making procurement decisions. It is time, he says, to look again at how we do things. In the November/December 2010 edition of this journal, Pete Goldin interviewed Joseph Sussman, chairman of the US's ITS Program Advisory Committee. Amongst other observations that Sussman made was that, technologically, ITS in the US is 10 years behind that in the world-l
  • September 7, 2016
    Eurotunnel selects Arbor Technology to maximise toll check-in efficiency
    Eurotunnel, owner of the Channel Tunnel, a key high-speed trnsport connection between the UK and France, has selected Arbor technology’s FPC-7701 fanless box PC for both its manned and fully automated toll booths which require reliable ruggedised embedded computing systems to maximise check-in efficiency. Processes such as number plate recognition, barrier control and ticket printing are controlled through this PC interface.