It's About Time

I spend a lot of time on subway platforms waiting for the next train to arrive.

It's unproductive time for the most part, although its a great time to put on my iPod and tune out.

Thanks the the London subway bombings (proof that bad things sometimes result in good things), the MTA has put out an RFP to wire 277 of NY city's 468 subway stations.

It's about time.  The safety issues are important, but so are the simple things like finding your daughter on her way home from play practice, or being able to send an email or SMS that you are running late.

The unfortunate thing is they decided not to wire every station.  I have this terrible feeling that the outer boroughs are going to get less stations wired than Manhattan.  If so, that's not right.

I think this is a step in the right direction.

The next step would be to put Wifi everywhere, but that's less likely now that one large cell carrier is going to pony up big money to get an exclusive contract to wire the subway.

It's too bad that cell phones that can use wifi aren't available in a mass market way right now.  That would have been an excellent solution with a much better long term value proposition for everyone involved.

But regardless of all that, it's about time we got cell phone coverage on the subway platforms of NYC and I applaud the MTA for making it happen.

Comments

[Dennis Dayman]

Might try out the Treo 600/650 as a nice small "Internet" on the go, but if you want high speed through cell phone...use your laptop, Treo600/650, and PDANet from June Fabrics (http://www.junefabrics.com).

When I'm needing more than just web or email access on the run (like reading Fred Wilson' blog), I just flip open my laptop, connect via bluetooth to my Treo 650, and PDANet turns my Treo into a high speed modem over the cellular network

-Dennis

P.S. Glad the kids are home safe!

[Scott Rogers]

You may also want to try one of many of the mobile RSS readers out there (including ours :) , http://freerangeinc.com/ ). Though some like Bloglines are WAP based and pretty much unusable even if you do have a signal, many compress and cache feeds and send them to your phone. Just press "update feeds" before you go underground (or get on a plane, whatever), and headlines and summaries of all your feeds will be pushed to your phone.

I scan about 85 feeds on my Blackberry on my way to work and am absolutely addicted...