TfL Wi-Fi popular route data
Request ID: FOI-1971-2021
Date published: 28 January 2021
You asked
Hi there,
Please could I have the following data sent to me via email and on excel documents, where specified:
- Please could I have the data for the busiest times (ticketing and WiFi demand) at London Waterloo station (all 3 tube line Wi-Fi traps as a collective total) as averaged (mean) between the following dates (with each date-range placed on a separate sheet of the Excel document, please):
- 8th July 2019 and 8th January 2020 (6 months)
- 23rd March 2020 and 10th May 2020
- 25th May 2020 and 23rd June 2020
- 4th November and 2nd December 2020
This is akin to the data visualised on page 27 of this PDF: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/review-tfl-wifi-pilot.pdf
- Please could I have a figure of the total sum of individual devices connected to the whole Wi-Fi network since records began (July 2019, I believe).
- Please could I have the raw number of individual devices connected to Wi-Fi at London Waterloo (all 3 tube line Wi-Fi traps collectively), London Bridge and King’s Cross St Pancras for each month of 2020. If device numbers are not possible, please could I have the Wi-Fi probing requests from each day - as seen on page 25 of this TfL document: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/review-tfl-wifi-pilot.pdf
We answered
Our Ref: FOI-1971-2021
Thank you for your request received on 4 January 2021 asking for information about the Wi-Fi available on the London Underground.
Your request has been considered in accordance with the requirements of the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act and our information access policy.
Under section 12 of the FOI Act, we are not obliged to comply with a request if we estimate that the cost of determining whether we hold the information, locating and retrieving it and extracting it from other information would exceed the appropriate limit. This is calculated at £25 per hour for every hour spent on the activities described. Section 12(4)(a) of the Act provides for the costs of complying with two or more requests made in a 60 working day period which are, to any extent, for the same or similar information to be combined. Section 12(4)(b) provides for requests made by different people acting in concert, or in pursuance of a campaign to be considered together under section 12.
We believe that you are working in concert with another requester that has submitted two requests in the last month regarding Wi-Fi on the London Underground. Their original request is identical to the request you have submitted. This original request was refused as we estimated that it would take over 36 hours to provide. This is because there would be a vast amount of data to review in order to extract the answers to the questions, and no particularly easy or efficient way of doing this.
We are therefore refusing both of these outstanding requests under section 12 of the FOI Act. Please note any further requests that we receive within a 60 working day timeframe from you or the other requester may also be subject to consideration under section 12 of FOI.
There is a small team available to respond to these requests and the burden placed on them has to be balanced with their substantive roles. To help bring the cost of responding to your request within the £450 limit, you may wish to prioritise the information you are most interested in and make a single request, rather than several requests in a short period of time in order to make the best use of the processing time available to you under the FOI Act.
Please see the attached information sheet for details of your right to appeal.
Yours sincerely
Gemma Jacob
Senior FOI Case Officer
FOI Case Management Team
General Counsel
Transport for London
[email protected]
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