“Sorry, I’m in the metro, I can’t pick up. » Very useful to escape an embarrassing conversation, the excuse will not hold in the trains of the Grand Paris Express. From the commissioning, staggered between 2025 and 2030, of these four new metro lines surrounding the capital, the connection of mobile phones will be provided in 4G or 5G in stations and on board trains, including within 180 kilometers network tunnels, some dug 55 meters deep.
Whatever their operator, the 3 million passengers expected each day on these lines will be able to call, but also feed their social networks, watch a series, listen to music online, send emails, follow a videoconference… All this, at great speed. Automatic, the trains will run on average between 55 and 65 kilometers per hour, with peaks at 110 kilometers per hour, two to three times faster than the Paris metro.
For the Société du Grand Paris (SGP), the public industrial and commercial establishment which is leading the construction of the metro, it was unthinkable to envisage these new lines without a connection, while the smartphone has become the best companion of each traveler. . It’s even written in the Greater Paris law of June 2010which provides that the infrastructures of the SGP “integrate devices intended to enable the deployment of very high-speed electronic communications networks”.
In addition to mobile, fiber optic lines are deployed under the 200 kilometers of rails of the future metro. Managed by RATP Connect, a subsidiary of the Paris metro, this fiber loop will be marketed to large companies or local authorities in the region to connect their various sites.
“Shared operator model”
The SGP did not want to relive the bad experience of the RATP either: launched in 2012, the Paris metro’s mobile Internet project was completed in 2020, five years behind schedule and with many ups and downs. In the discharge of the management, the metro stations were not adapted to accommodate the servers necessary for a mobile network. In the case of the Grand Paris Express, rooms for telecom equipment are included in the plans. And rather than entrusting the project directly to Orange, SFR, Bouygues Telecom and Free, at the risk of suffering from divisions between these competitors, the SGP chose the model of the neutral operator.
Largest construction site in Europe, with a cost of 36 billion euros, the Grand Paris Express is also a new experience for telecom infrastructure groups
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