TTC 5G Subway Launch

Toronto's subway was one of the last major transit systems in North America without reliable cellular service underground. Rogers operated the TTC's connectivity network, and a federal mandate required that it carry not just its own customers but Bell's and Telus's too, so every rider on every carrier gets 5G and 911 access in the tunnels as a safety baseline, all against a hard government deadline.

Rather than three operators building three overlapping systems in the same confined tunnels, I delivered a Multi-Operator Core Network (MOCN) solution that integrated Bell and Telus alongside Rogers into the TTC distributed antenna system. One shared radio layer, three independent cores: less hardware in the tunnels, a cleaner regulatory story, and a faster path to coverage for every rider regardless of carrier.

Tunnel work could only happen when the trains stopped. I ran the integration across overnight maintenance windows, roughly 2am to 5am, over four months, the narrow nightly slot when the system is closed. Coordinating three carriers' engineering teams against a hard public deadline, in a space with zero margin for schedule slip, was the core of the job.

The launch covered 85 stations and 15 km of tunnels and delivered ahead of the federal deadline. The work won the 2024 Ted Rogers Award for Innovation in 5G deployment, Rogers' top internal recognition for the year's standout 5G project.