Snapshot of _Dropping train wi-fi is symbolic of our miserable, pinched country_ :
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This will effectively change absolutely nothing, because the existing wifi was so shit it practically never worked anyway. I normally just use my 4g for the whole ride.
Practically yeah, but it is a backwards step considering so many of our neighbours have very functional, easy to access free wi-fi on their trains.
Our public transport wi-fi situation has always been a total hellscape. If it's free, it would be utterly shit. If it wasn't free - which thankfully hasn't been the case for a few years - it would be mind-bogglingly expensive and also shit.
I think the article is right - it's entirely predictable that with our wank train infrastructure that free wi-fi would be dropped to penny pinch. It's a backwards step, as usual.
Yep as an example stagecoach buses in the South West temporarily turned off their Wi-Fi during the first lockdown as a money saving step. It's now may 2023 and it's still temporarily turned off.
Stagecoach are by far the worst company I've ever had to deal with.
Piss poor service, piss poor customer complaints/handling, just completely piss poor all around.
Busses (and this stagecoach) are a transport of last resort in this country. You use it only when you have literally no other choice... So why bother trying to be nice or competitive?
It's our only choice up here unless you want to fork out £30-40 per taxi journey.
Thankfully I drive but have had to give lifts to family and friends so that they don't miss appointments because a bus hasn't turned up and they can't afford a taxi.
Stagecoach are the abosoute pits. They complain they can't get drivers but it's no wonder given the appalling working conditions and shite pay they offer (I have friends who drive for them).
They couldn't give a toss about the service they provide (which is a vital public service in the Highlands), they don't give a fuck about their staff and even less so about their customers. All they care about is maximising profits without uodating their fleet (which is falling apart.. although granted they have introduced a fleet of electric buses here recently) and squeezing more and more out of their staff.
Have they left it on just enough for you to try and log in each time before you get the temporary down notice. I'm pretty sure that's just to fuck with us to be honest.
20 years ago I moved to S Korea and was amazed to find I had a phone signal EVERYWHERE. On trains, buses, subways. In the countryside. In tunnels. On mountains. Even on ferries out at sea!
Wi-Fi came a bit later, but it’s been universal on buses trains and subways for 10 years or so I’d say.
I had a friend move somewhere REALLY remote and he only got 1 bar on his phone. Called the company. They attached a base station to his house the next day.
Went on holiday to South Korea recently, it was amazing. Made me realise how stupid it is that on the London underground they have Wifi only on the *platforms...* so its functionally useless once you're on a train. And the trains usually pass through stops faster than your phone can realise there is wifi and reconnect.
In Seoul they just have wifi on the trains themselves.
Always like telecommunications comparisons with South Korea:
In 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do.
Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia.
"Our colleagues in South Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say."
Like Ronnie, she was a useful stooge. Unlike Ronnie they kicked her out, on her arse crying, in front of the world when she got uppity. Served her right (but for the wrong reasons).
Hence why we’re so behind on FTTP rollout and the government is having to incentivise its deployment
I’ve met a guy who worked for BICs and used to do some of the first fibre splicing in the country. Those old fibre splicers were something.
Is this a quoted from somewhere? Sounds interesting.
https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784
God that's depressing.
I was in Hong Kong not too long ago and used my phone the whole time on the underground whilst enjoying a cool air conditioned carriage and station even though it was like 33 degrees outside.
They only have it on platforms in London still? Wow haha. What about a 4g or 5g phone signals?? Have not taken the underground in London for 10 years.
Korea is great. I don’t live there anymore but wish I did!
There's just not space for the infrastructure in the deep level Tubes - you need to put microcell antennas or passive repeaters so there's line of sight all the way through the tunnel, and deep level Tube trains have a couple of inches clearance around the outside of the tunnel in many places.
Lots of the UK's rail infrastructure has the problem of being the world's prototype/minimum viable product for railways. The old bridges were built low and tight, the curves on many lines are tight, tunnels are *exceptionally* narrow because when they were planned and built, nobody was quite sure if this "trains" thing was a pipe dream or not. So it was all done to a budget, because the money men initially didn't want to take on so much risk.
Obviously it pretty quickly became apparent it *was* a good idea so new infra was built more generously, but the problem is network effects - if there are existing designs for the smaller size, and you want to run a train that's larger, you can't use the existing infrastructure. If you build a compatible train, then *your* new infrastructure has got lots of very expensive accommodation for bigger/faster/etc that you aren't using.
Eventually this slowly clears up - tunnels are eventually renewed, lines straightened, grade crossings removed, etc - but on e.g. the West Coast Main Line, this process didn't end until the 2000s (and electrification, the biggest thing of all, is still not yet done!)
But for something like the Tube, really there's never going to be a reasonable way to do something like wifi. The South Koreans saw the excellent benefits of building nice spacious tunnels with plenty of room for expansion and modification, and reap the rewards of being able to point to "don't do it that way" in the UK. Modern UK projects (like Crossrail, the Eurotunnel/HS1, HS2) *do* build in all these, as do extensions to Tube lines where they use modern standards unless they can predict they will never need the gains and it's too marginally costly. But upgrading existing Tube lines is a nonstarter because it means taking a whole, absolutely critical, bit of public transport infrastructure out of service for *years* to do the work. It was bad enough when they needed to do the Bank upgrade works and split the Bank branch in half for four months; now imagine that rolling closure on e.g. the Jubilee, for three years.
That's partly because that stretch of the Northern line was originally part of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead, which used slightly bigger tunnel bores than the City and South London - that "being second means you don't have to cut margins as much" thing was true then as much as it is now, but the amount of "extra stuff" they expected to put in the tunnels then was considerably smaller. (You also gain a bit from being able to run longer carriages, by making the tunnel wider around corners; on the first Tubes this was easy enough to do in the corner, but as tunneling technology improved and became more automated, "just make it the same size all the way" became the norm)
The modern Tube is this incredible/awful palimpsest of *slightly* different competing standards and decisions, going back 150-ish years - which then means *every* project using the existing infra is often a set of weird constraints. Think the infamous [French platforms mistake](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27497727) but with five or six layers.
I agree with the sentiment of what a lot of you are saying but you aren’t being entirely truthful. Parts of The Tube has 4G in the tunnels now and the whole network will be covered in the next year or so.
I was impressed when I visited Moscow in 2008 and found I had a strong phone signal on the underground system, in both the tunnels and the stations. It's an old metro system originally built during the 1930s, and very deep level too!
15 years later, and we still don't get a phone signal on the London Underground, apart from the Jubilee line extension stations since 2020, and some of the shallow stations where you can pick up the surface signal (just about).
Throughout Asia, all the underground systems I've used since 10+ years ago (Bangkok, Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong) have full mobile phone signal throughout, including in the tunnels.
Network Rail is still using GSM-R:
[https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/gsm-r-communicating-on-the-railway/](https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/gsm-r-communicating-on-the-railway/)
All those cell towers along the UK rail routes only support GSM-R
There's an discussion for 5G and FRMCS:
[https://www.railjournal.com/telecoms/private-finance-to-fund-network-rail-telecoms-upgrade/](https://www.railjournal.com/telecoms/private-finance-to-fund-network-rail-telecoms-upgrade/)
It'll involve laying new Fibre Optic and should be opened to the Public instead of Free Wifi, but I'm not holding my breath.
Stafford train station is always a dead zone for me. I get signal just fine outside the station though. Its a pain when my train is cancelled as the boards won't show the next train time and I can't search for train times on my phone network unless I leave the station. I find myself sometimes standing next to any train to get on its WiFi just for this quick search.
Does anyone use it there when we all have internet on our phones with no hassle?
Just seems like a waste of money to me - I don't understand the outrage at all.
I think the target audience is more towards longer distance business travel, a stable WiFi connection is makes working on your laptop more convenient. Admittedly I no longer live in the UK, but for routes where trains, buses and flights are all of roughly equivalent time and cost, I'll always choose the train because of two reasons, evo friendliness and the ability to work.
Because it does? Many people find it useful. Why does it exist in many other countries then? Why did it exist at all?
I used it a lot in Copenhagen and it was a lifesaver as my data was limited roaming.
I feel like it's a bit of a legacy thing. It was genuinely useful when mobile data was slow, expensive and patchy, but these days I can work on my laptop all the way down to London from Newcastle hooked to my phone without issue. Previously I was reliant on train wifi.
If that's true for most people (given that the vast majority of people have smartphones and data these days) then adding something fairly complex and expensive into the mix when it's not used isn't great use of money. I suppose you could equate it to when they removed phones from the trains, because mobiles became ubiquitous.
Well not everyone will have unlimited data, and not everyone will be using their phones for internet, favouring some other device instead, and out of those, not everyone will have tethering options.
But really it is, like the article says, symbolic. It's a piece of technological and societal progress that we've subsequently regressed.
Imagine, for instance, if our TV broadcasts were to all be taken back to 480p resolution, or to black and white. Functionally, the service would still work, and everyone would still be able to watch Celebrity Dancing On Broken Glass In The Jungle, or Misery Street. But you'd be hard-pressed not to think "we've taken a step backwards here".
This service probably costs tens of millions. I'm not sure this is the best way to help people if I'm honest.
If you want to listen or watch something on a train download it before you leave.
Right = accepting shit, despite the fact that a better way is not only possible, but is currently being done by plenty of other countries.
Also would this not be a private service, since the trains aren't publicly owned?
Yeh that's not why people care. Nobody is against this because they want all private trains to have government WiFi because more public service = good.
It's because it's another example of our country accepting subpar services, despite the fact that we're a very rich country and the technology for this has been readily available for years.
It's like saying people who are against potholes in roads just want more government services. What people want is an appropriate standard of service for one of the world's richest nations.
Yeah, I never had any joy with the train Wifi - and since 4G became a thing I've found my own connection to be far superior.
However, it would be nice if we would just stop fucking half-arsing everything in this country and actually knuckle down a bit.
It’s not outrageously expensive but you’d be better off flushing the money down the toilet because plane wifi is absolutely atrocious. You pay the money and then spend the rest of the flight trying to get anything to actually load.
It works in 2 ways – firstly satcoms, secondly it can talk to the cell network if it's over land.
It's a lot easier for planes as they will generally have uninterrupted LOS to the satellites or cell towers, whereas a train is on the ground and often doesn't have clear LOS.
Yeah it’s satellite, interestingly the whole shortwave spectrum would fit into a single 5GHz band wifi channel with room to spare and other kinds of radio wave can’t travel over the horizon usually. The bandwidth is really crappy on shortwave which is why it’s only any good for text, grainy images, and AM radio broadcasting which uses less bandwidth than FM.
Some long distance yachtsmen still use shortwave to communicate with the shore and other boats as satellite internet is still so expensive, you can use voice or there’s a service that receives emails over shortwave and forwards them on over the internet.
> How does WiFi on planes work, the same way?
No. Cell tower coverage basically doesn't go up - complete waste of capacity. Also, transmission is limited by speed of the mobile party; airplanes are too fast.
I know there are satellite providers for internet in the air, no idea if alternatives exist. You could have cell towers that point up, but I doubt that that's what's happening for internet.
Some googling suggests that airplanes do in fact use air-to-ground data communication. Cell towers were mentioned, too. As per above, I have my doubts that they are the same towers we use with our mobile phones, but I truly don't know.
Possibly using the same towers (although nowhere near as many of them - you wouldn't need to, because of the line of sight a plane has) but a different antenna and frequency allocation.
Two ways:
1. Via phone towers like trains. They have a high strength antenna on the belly of the aircraft that quickly roams between phone towers it happens to fly over.
2. Less commonly, satellite. There's an antenna on the roof that communicates with satellites in orbit. Obviously works better for long-haul flights over water.
I think some of them use satellites, I bet SpaceX and similar are going to clean up that market because they’ll be so much better than the existing options.
Train wifi doesn’t work in tunnels either. It works roughly the same way your phone works but is _supposed_ to have longer range and be faster… but I find that actually my phone gets better connection than the train wifi.
Because train internet is mobile internet, which doesn't reach into tunnels without repeaters in the tunnels. Do you know how other countries manage it?
To be honest unless the tunnel is long it may not matter because a brief interruption won't cause much disruption to a lot of applications.
TfL trials show that you can get great signal with a leaky feeder down a tunnel. Out of tunnels it’s hard to believe that filling in the coverage gaps could be all that difficult. You could then have genuinely useful 4g and WiFi coverage which would allow people to get work done during journeys. Of course it’s cheaper just to scrap it, as the article notes.
You can tell when you're close to Worplesdon because the entire carriage drops their phone call and stares at browser loading pages for about five minutes.
i use a vpn and that lets me stream content on train wifi. though it feels selfish to use up all the bandwidth on an already meagre line that others want to use too. so i usually only do it if the trains aren't busy.
Well the Wi-Fi is probably coming from the same 4G masts anyway. It's not like the train is plugged in. Sure, the antenna is bigger, but the Wi-Fi isn't exactly fully reliable or fast either.
Just improve the 4G and 5G coverage along the lines and get rid of the Wi-Fi middleman.
You're lucky to get 4g. I can barely get 4g in most places these days, coverage is patchy at best. I went to Sweden over Christmas and had perfect 4g everywhere I went.
It's not necessarily about the practical effect, but the symbolic nature.
Our neighbours and international community provide these services to their citizens because they see value. Companies offer it not as a luxury but as a standard.
It's completely symbolic if the backward trajectory we now seem to be on.
Indeed it’s utterly woeful. Is there anyone who actually uses it? I’ve tried it several times and each time got ZERO data. Even where you pay for it cross country it’s horrendous. I did once, and got a horrible rate so never touched it ever again. My own mobile hotspot is always significantly more reliable. If it was actually a good connection people would use it, but it isn’t. It just feels like it’s a scam.
The only time I have got good wifi in a train was Heathrow Express.
I used to work as the technical engineer for a 40 year old fleet of trains. Getting WiFi installed was a nightmare, but once it was in it cost two parts of FA and we never had to do more than turn it off and on again if it broke.
There's a lot of inefficiencies in the railways, but this isn't it.
I shared this article with a peer and their response was:
“I guess in comparison with the train actually turning up at all, turning up on time, being the right size, going to where it says it's going, seat reservations actually working and it not costing a fucking small fortune, in comparison wifi is not a priority.”
>Treasury Brain is a crippling psychological condition that leaves its victims tragically unable to read both sides of a balance sheet. So impaired are sufferers’ decision-making that it’s only a matter of time before one sells their home to cut down on heating bills.
There is currently an outbreak at the Department for Transport (DfT), which is engaged in an extensive programme of making Britain’s railways very slightly cheaper, at the tiny cost of making the experience of travelling on them significantly worse. The latest edict from the department to rail operators, as reported by the one-time London mayoral candidate Christian Wolmar on the Calling All Stations podcast, is that they should stop offering wi-fi unless they can justify it financially. “Our railways are currently not financially sustainable, and it is unfair to continue asking taxpayers to foot the bill,” a government spokesperson told the Guardian in response to the story. “Passenger surveys consistently show that on-train wi-fi is low on their list of priorities.”
>That may well be true: if someone asked me my top priorities for a functioning railway, I doubt I’d say “wi-fi” and more likely opt “for water to come out of the tap in the loos when I press the button”. Both these are things whose absence, however, feels immensely irritating, and if a decent internet connection doesn’t occupy the same rank on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as functional plumbing it’s still useful if you’re the sort of person who travels a lot for work, or, hey, if you’re the sort of person who just wants to watch a video on their phone.
>All this fits into a pattern of budget squeezes that has also featured numerous cuts to services and frequencies, as the end of the franchise system has allowed the Treasury to tighten its grip. This always felt an odd sort of way to run a railway, even when passenger numbers were still below pre-pandemic levels thanks to the rise of working from home – if you want to attract more passengers, wouldn’t you make services better? But now the numbers are at an all-time high it looks actively bizarre. I’m beginning to suspect that Rishi Sunak, who takes private jets whenever he can – who has gutted HS2, and last week dropped Boris Johnson-era plans for significant railway reform – just doesn’t like trains. (I bet you anything there’s wi-fi on those planes.)
>Losing wi-fi is not as big a blow as losing services, but it feels sort of symbolic of the miserable, pinched country that Treasury Brain is creating. Other countries invest in their infrastructure and public realm; their railway networks use on-board wi-fi as a selling point. Here, though, we deal not in assets but in costs, and the possibility it might be worth spending money to make things a little bit better is as baffling to the government as the idea that more railway journeys might be seen as a good thing. In Tory Britain, everything, in every way, must constantly be getting worse. But it might also cost the state less money. So who’s to say whether it’s good or bad?
It's mainly down to how rail lines are usually built into the landscape, they're often intentionally occluded by embankments to prevent or minimise noise pollution to the surrounding environment. Unfortunately this is also an excellent way to block radio signals.
I spend all day looking at the rail network and honestly it's very rare you come across earthworks solely for noise pollution.
When rail is in cutting it's normally because that's how you had to do it to keep the track gradient as flat as possible.
The majority of the track alignment in this country is the same as it was in the 19th century, with probably about 90% the same as pre WW2. They weren't building sound attenuation measures then
It's less about noise and more about appeasing rich 19th century landowners who didn't want their views "ruined"...
Of course, you don't have to look much into the "controversy" over HS2 to see the exact same attitudes from today's rich landowners.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism.
The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes.
The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India,
which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
> this is despite the fact that a lot of rail lines have existing fibre optic running alongside them
It's not like you can just splice into the fibre a 4g transmitter. They'd have to lay fresh cable.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism.
The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes.
The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India,
which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
> you just need to overcome a minor bit of doppler shift
I mean at 125 mph the doppler shift of a 1920 MHz signal is less than 360 Hz, which is somewhat less than LTE channel spacing...
One of the great mistakes that people often make is to think that any organisation called'"National Rifle Association' is a branch or chapter of the National Rifle Association of America. This could not be further from the truth.
The National Rifle Association of America became a political lobbying organisation in 1977 after the Cincinnati Revolt at their Annual General Meeting. It is self-contined within the United States of America and has no foreign branches.
All the other National Rifle Associations remain true to their founding aims of promoting marksmanship, firearm safety and target shooting. This includes the original NRA in the United Kingdom, which was founded in 1859 - twelve years
before the NRA of America. It is also true of the National Rifle Association of Australia, the National Rifle Association of New Zealand, the National Rifle Association of India, the National Rifle Association of Japan and the National
Rifle Association of Pakistan. All these organisations are often known as "the NRA" in their respective countries. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
I don't see how timing would matter - it manifests as doppler shift. You can't get out-of-order arrivals this way, for example. Handing over connections is important and one reason why mobile phones don't work on planes, but cell towers are spaced so that handover can take place for phones travelling at normal speeds like in a car or on a train.
It’s always going to be shit moving between cell towers. Mobile networks aren’t really suitable for internet on trains, the tech is moving towards smaller cells so will probably be even worse in future.
To quote someone who I know lived in Germany for a bit, you quickly learn what "Ausfallen" means.
Oddly Italy seems to have sussed out public transport and trains, minus the occasional fire.
I once got off a flight into Manchester and my train was in the station. There was another in 20 minutes and I smoke so decided to miss that one and have my first fag in like eight hours or something.
Worst decision ever.
Was sat around for three hours until all the staff went home, announced all trains were cancelled and told us taxis were on their way.
I was sat with a German guy for some of this who was headed to Leeds, same as I was. The most surprising words I have ever heard were "it's better than Germany".
I visited Copenhagen and that put Merseyrail to show. The train felt like something straight out Star Trek. Even the buses were miles better; 3 doors (front, middle and back) and you "pay" by swiping your oyster-equivalent as you hop on.
Fast, clean and efficient.
I was in Austria and the trains were immaculate. They looked as if they had been put into service that day. Also had displays telling you what connections were available and times of departure at each station as you approached.
TGV in France is phenomenal!
Honestly when I was in Copenhagen I thought the London Underground was definitely better. The Copenhagen metro was expensive (like everything in Copenhagen is), had few seats (and they were not comfortable), did not have as wide a coverage across the city despite it being way smaller than London, and was certainly no better in terms of congestion.
Of course it's better than the rest of the country outside of London, but comparing capital to capital I definitely think the Underground is better overall. Of course there are issues w/ the Underground that Copenhagen doesn't have just because of how old it is (e.g., shitty ventilation on some of the lines, occasional deafening screeches) but even considering that the Underground is still one of the best in the world.
Sometimes in Italy the stations look like something out of an old film. Then you get [a train like this](https://trainspo.com/photo/87510/) coming through to Milan.
Meanwhile the [local trains](https://trainspo.com/photo/18621/?list=class) might not be ultra luxurious at times, but there are enough carriages to suit the demand.
Ask any German and they'll laugh if you claim their trains are good. Not an excuse for us but the current economic model is making things worse for many
I rode a long distance one. It was huge and Soviet, you had to climb up onto the thing from a low platform.
But. It was on time, I got a big seat, it was cheap, and the loo worked (admittedly it was a hole directly onto the track… but functional !)
Relative to our National Rail much of Europe does better but the Underground is definitely up there with the best, as is the London bus system. I've been on the Berlin and Copenhagen metros and I don't think either were better than the Underground.
The rest of the country bar a couple of places (I heard Nottingham has pretty good public transport but I've never been there...) is pretty dire though, yes.
Cheaper, sure... But quality wise, not really. In most of Europe a one-per-hour service is "high frequency" and there are _plenty_ of trains using coaches from the 1960s/70s with varying levels of refurbishment. Once you get away from the high-speed lines, pretty much nothing operates above 75mph. One of the "benefits" of the UK's penny-pinching strategy of stretching 19th-century infrastructure instead of building new is that speeds of 100mph or so are pretty ubiquitous on "main lines".
To Northern Rail.
Cant sell what you don't own:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-all-british-train-lines-are-now-owned-by-other-eu-countries/
Northern Rail retired its last Pacer in 2020. Though they may have been replaced with other crap rolling stock of course. Fact remains those trains get sold abroad.
It's absurd. Of course people are going to say reliability, punctuality and cost when asked about priorities. To then say people aren't bothered about WiFi is just incorrect. They are bothered, just the rest is more important and currently more shit.
It's all to stop you replanning your journey when train is increasingly delayed, stop you making a delay repay claim when sat on the train after the cancelled one you planned to get.
I found it hilarious that it doesnt come as standard to have a charge on trains from london to Manchester. I also had a really rough time getting there with delays so i didnt pay for the return. Merci for the free ride Avanti
Ha! Like it makes any difference. Never once have I connected to train WiFi and had it work.
It is beyond ridiculous how poor this bit of infrastructure is in London. We spend so much time commuting and are cutoff from the internet for this time period
Or it's a sign that everyone has enough mobile data that they don't want to give out their personal details to log into a WiFi connection that won't be any better?
There's little point in offering a service that people aren't using.
The Wi-Fi is not exactly fully reliable either. Remember, it's just using the cell towers anyway - the train isn't plugged in to the Internet via a really long fibre. Sure, the antenna is bigger, but it would be much better to just improve the 4G and 5G coverage that everyone is using anyway and cut out the middleman.
That's why I use a phone with a USB-C charger. My laptop and phone can be charged with the same cable plugged in below the seat.
Not sure of any trains to and from London without power.
> Mobile signal is not consistent along our railways
But the trains are just using 4G anyway. If your signal isn't consistent, then nor will the trains be. Perhaps thats where the investment should be? Ensuring there are masts along the routes.
No, lots of intercity train lines don’t have mobile data coverage between cities (no telecom provider is going to waste money putting up 4g towers in the countryside) so during train journeys people regularly lose internet connection.
Theoretically, on-board wifi could provide a more stable connection (because you can fit a larger antenna on a train as opposed to a phone, so train wifi should have longer range) but in practice it’s just as crap, if not worse, than just using mobile data from your phone. People would definitely use the on-board wifi if it actually worked.
>no telecom provider is going to waste money putting up 4g towers in the countryside
Except all the ones in mainland Europe where, intercity or otherwise, decent public transport WiFi is a given.
Merseyrails new trains came with WiFi as standard for the first time. I remember getting on one for the first time and the damn thing didn't work. The login never actually showed up so it was comeptlely useless. Why bother touting wifi if it won't fucking work
in other countries a) the train wifi connection works and/or b) the mobile signal strength is not 1 bar anywhere, never mind along arterial train lines.
we're so rubbish!
Especially since the wifi signups aren't even slightly GDPR compliant with their mandatory acceptance of marketing emails and lack of privacy policies (last time I tried to read one, it just redirected back to the signup page; i.e. you can only read it once you've connected)... Pretty sure your entire browsing record with attached personal details are up for sale.
But since it's not "the Internet" as such, companies don't seem to think that data protection law applies and the ICO certainly doesn't care.
There's also the fact that nobody is going to consider it worthwhile to spend 5-10 minutes signing up for these things unless the journey is at least an hour.
[email protected] was my address of choice. Maybe I'm more genteel than you.
Back in the day I used to give websites which demanded a phone number (for some reason) the number for Hastings Direct.
Not sure when you last went on a train but for the most part mobile signal is horrendous when you are travelling via one.
The wifi wasn’t great but was something, and people absolutely are using.
> personal details
You mean a fake email address?
I actually don't have enough mobile data to tether my laptop on train journeys. But you're right that we could do.
There are plenty of older people who don't have good data agreements who would need to use the wifi. Plus you don't have to enter your real personal details just say your name is "dghisdfis dfhisds" and your email is [email protected] or whatever (I feel bad for whoever actually owns that account).
perhaps, but not that many people use Wifi anymore. I've happily shared a phone data hotspot with other people that needed wifi for their device but didn't have any data.
But there isn't a widespread culture of asking others for wifi.
I commute from Nottingham to London and essentially have zero internet the whole way. It’s ridiculous when I’m Switzerland I can be climbing up a mountain and have fast internet the whole way. It would make my commute so much better being able to work.
The Treasury has fought tooth and nail to ring fence road spending whilst descoping the fuel escalator formula despite every forecast saying we need to reduce car use. Cycling funding slashed. Bus funding stagnant. It’s only only a ‘balance sheet’ issue for modes not of interest.
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This will effectively change absolutely nothing, because the existing wifi was so shit it practically never worked anyway. I normally just use my 4g for the whole ride.
Practically yeah, but it is a backwards step considering so many of our neighbours have very functional, easy to access free wi-fi on their trains. Our public transport wi-fi situation has always been a total hellscape. If it's free, it would be utterly shit. If it wasn't free - which thankfully hasn't been the case for a few years - it would be mind-bogglingly expensive and also shit. I think the article is right - it's entirely predictable that with our wank train infrastructure that free wi-fi would be dropped to penny pinch. It's a backwards step, as usual.
Yep as an example stagecoach buses in the South West temporarily turned off their Wi-Fi during the first lockdown as a money saving step. It's now may 2023 and it's still temporarily turned off.
Stagecoach are by far the worst company I've ever had to deal with. Piss poor service, piss poor customer complaints/handling, just completely piss poor all around.
Busses (and this stagecoach) are a transport of last resort in this country. You use it only when you have literally no other choice... So why bother trying to be nice or competitive?
It's our only choice up here unless you want to fork out £30-40 per taxi journey. Thankfully I drive but have had to give lifts to family and friends so that they don't miss appointments because a bus hasn't turned up and they can't afford a taxi. Stagecoach are the abosoute pits. They complain they can't get drivers but it's no wonder given the appalling working conditions and shite pay they offer (I have friends who drive for them). They couldn't give a toss about the service they provide (which is a vital public service in the Highlands), they don't give a fuck about their staff and even less so about their customers. All they care about is maximising profits without uodating their fleet (which is falling apart.. although granted they have introduced a fleet of electric buses here recently) and squeezing more and more out of their staff.
Yep that's them
And in the North (Yorkshire)
Have they left it on just enough for you to try and log in each time before you get the temporary down notice. I'm pretty sure that's just to fuck with us to be honest.
I don't think even that? Like I feel like I've gotten onto buses saying that they have free wifi, but there's no signal?
They put cell towers along the routes. In the UK we just use the existing cell towers which might be quite some way from the train.
20 years ago I moved to S Korea and was amazed to find I had a phone signal EVERYWHERE. On trains, buses, subways. In the countryside. In tunnels. On mountains. Even on ferries out at sea! Wi-Fi came a bit later, but it’s been universal on buses trains and subways for 10 years or so I’d say. I had a friend move somewhere REALLY remote and he only got 1 bar on his phone. Called the company. They attached a base station to his house the next day.
Went on holiday to South Korea recently, it was amazing. Made me realise how stupid it is that on the London underground they have Wifi only on the *platforms...* so its functionally useless once you're on a train. And the trains usually pass through stops faster than your phone can realise there is wifi and reconnect. In Seoul they just have wifi on the trains themselves.
Always like telecommunications comparisons with South Korea: In 1990, then Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, decided that BT's rapid and extensive rollout of fibre optic broadband was anti-competitive and held a monopoly on a technology and service that no other telecom company could do. Unfortunately, the Thatcher government decided that it wanted the American cable companies providing the same service to increase competition. So the decision was made to close down the local loop roll out and in 1991 that roll out was stopped. The two factories that BT had built to build fibre related components were sold to Fujitsu and HP, the assets were stripped and the expertise was shipped out to South East Asia. "Our colleagues in South Korea and Japan, who were working with quite closely at the time, stood back and looked at what happened to us in amazement. What was pivotal was that they carried on with their respective fibre rollouts. And, well, the rest is history as they say."
People actually gas this woman up for being a great politician when she believed such delusional drivel lol.
Like Ronnie, she was a useful stooge. Unlike Ronnie they kicked her out, on her arse crying, in front of the world when she got uppity. Served her right (but for the wrong reasons).
Hence why we’re so behind on FTTP rollout and the government is having to incentivise its deployment I’ve met a guy who worked for BICs and used to do some of the first fibre splicing in the country. Those old fibre splicers were something.
Is this a quoted from somewhere? Sounds interesting. https://www.techradar.com/news/world-of-tech/how-the-uk-lost-the-broadband-race-in-1990-1224784 God that's depressing.
Google the quotation, article's on tech radar.
I was in Hong Kong not too long ago and used my phone the whole time on the underground whilst enjoying a cool air conditioned carriage and station even though it was like 33 degrees outside.
Of course, at that temperature, people would cook in the carriages if there was no AC.
You mean like they do in London?
For about 2 weeks a year, yes.
Way longer than that during rush hour on any of the major commuter routes and tube lines.
At least it forces dickheads who talk on the phone to shut up.
They only have it on platforms in London still? Wow haha. What about a 4g or 5g phone signals?? Have not taken the underground in London for 10 years. Korea is great. I don’t live there anymore but wish I did!
There's just not space for the infrastructure in the deep level Tubes - you need to put microcell antennas or passive repeaters so there's line of sight all the way through the tunnel, and deep level Tube trains have a couple of inches clearance around the outside of the tunnel in many places. Lots of the UK's rail infrastructure has the problem of being the world's prototype/minimum viable product for railways. The old bridges were built low and tight, the curves on many lines are tight, tunnels are *exceptionally* narrow because when they were planned and built, nobody was quite sure if this "trains" thing was a pipe dream or not. So it was all done to a budget, because the money men initially didn't want to take on so much risk. Obviously it pretty quickly became apparent it *was* a good idea so new infra was built more generously, but the problem is network effects - if there are existing designs for the smaller size, and you want to run a train that's larger, you can't use the existing infrastructure. If you build a compatible train, then *your* new infrastructure has got lots of very expensive accommodation for bigger/faster/etc that you aren't using. Eventually this slowly clears up - tunnels are eventually renewed, lines straightened, grade crossings removed, etc - but on e.g. the West Coast Main Line, this process didn't end until the 2000s (and electrification, the biggest thing of all, is still not yet done!) But for something like the Tube, really there's never going to be a reasonable way to do something like wifi. The South Koreans saw the excellent benefits of building nice spacious tunnels with plenty of room for expansion and modification, and reap the rewards of being able to point to "don't do it that way" in the UK. Modern UK projects (like Crossrail, the Eurotunnel/HS1, HS2) *do* build in all these, as do extensions to Tube lines where they use modern standards unless they can predict they will never need the gains and it's too marginally costly. But upgrading existing Tube lines is a nonstarter because it means taking a whole, absolutely critical, bit of public transport infrastructure out of service for *years* to do the work. It was bad enough when they needed to do the Bank upgrade works and split the Bank branch in half for four months; now imagine that rolling closure on e.g. the Jubilee, for three years.
You can get 4G underground between archway and Kentish Town. It’s part of the trial to roll it out further
It’s not a trial. It is being rolled out across the network. The data centres are built, and the antennas are going in.
That's partly because that stretch of the Northern line was originally part of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead, which used slightly bigger tunnel bores than the City and South London - that "being second means you don't have to cut margins as much" thing was true then as much as it is now, but the amount of "extra stuff" they expected to put in the tunnels then was considerably smaller. (You also gain a bit from being able to run longer carriages, by making the tunnel wider around corners; on the first Tubes this was easy enough to do in the corner, but as tunneling technology improved and became more automated, "just make it the same size all the way" became the norm) The modern Tube is this incredible/awful palimpsest of *slightly* different competing standards and decisions, going back 150-ish years - which then means *every* project using the existing infra is often a set of weird constraints. Think the infamous [French platforms mistake](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27497727) but with five or six layers.
Yes there is! The whole network will be covered and is being built now.
Don't leaky feeders feature?
I agree with the sentiment of what a lot of you are saying but you aren’t being entirely truthful. Parts of The Tube has 4G in the tunnels now and the whole network will be covered in the next year or so.
I was impressed when I visited Moscow in 2008 and found I had a strong phone signal on the underground system, in both the tunnels and the stations. It's an old metro system originally built during the 1930s, and very deep level too! 15 years later, and we still don't get a phone signal on the London Underground, apart from the Jubilee line extension stations since 2020, and some of the shallow stations where you can pick up the surface signal (just about). Throughout Asia, all the underground systems I've used since 10+ years ago (Bangkok, Seoul, Osaka, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong) have full mobile phone signal throughout, including in the tunnels.
[Meanwhile, in the UK...](https://www.google.com/search?q=council+rejects+all+5g+masts)
Next day!!!!! I bet it is next decade or even century in UK
Did everyone clap after?
?
Internet meme to suggest your story about (presumably) your friend getting a base station attached to his house is made up.
Oh. I’m not sure who the ‘everyone’ was. It was just him and his wife. I doubt they clapped.
Network Rail is still using GSM-R: [https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/gsm-r-communicating-on-the-railway/](https://www.networkrail.co.uk/running-the-railway/gsm-r-communicating-on-the-railway/) All those cell towers along the UK rail routes only support GSM-R There's an discussion for 5G and FRMCS: [https://www.railjournal.com/telecoms/private-finance-to-fund-network-rail-telecoms-upgrade/](https://www.railjournal.com/telecoms/private-finance-to-fund-network-rail-telecoms-upgrade/) It'll involve laying new Fibre Optic and should be opened to the Public instead of Free Wifi, but I'm not holding my breath.
Stafford train station is always a dead zone for me. I get signal just fine outside the station though. Its a pain when my train is cancelled as the boards won't show the next train time and I can't search for train times on my phone network unless I leave the station. I find myself sometimes standing next to any train to get on its WiFi just for this quick search.
Does anyone use it there when we all have internet on our phones with no hassle? Just seems like a waste of money to me - I don't understand the outrage at all.
I think the target audience is more towards longer distance business travel, a stable WiFi connection is makes working on your laptop more convenient. Admittedly I no longer live in the UK, but for routes where trains, buses and flights are all of roughly equivalent time and cost, I'll always choose the train because of two reasons, evo friendliness and the ability to work.
That's the thing: Your phone is more stable than the crappy train wifi anyway
I think that's the problem which needs addressing. It shouldn't be the excuse we use to just stop trying.
Why waste tens of millions trying to solve a problem that doesn't need solving.
Because it does? Many people find it useful. Why does it exist in many other countries then? Why did it exist at all? I used it a lot in Copenhagen and it was a lifesaver as my data was limited roaming.
I feel like it's a bit of a legacy thing. It was genuinely useful when mobile data was slow, expensive and patchy, but these days I can work on my laptop all the way down to London from Newcastle hooked to my phone without issue. Previously I was reliant on train wifi. If that's true for most people (given that the vast majority of people have smartphones and data these days) then adding something fairly complex and expensive into the mix when it's not used isn't great use of money. I suppose you could equate it to when they removed phones from the trains, because mobiles became ubiquitous.
Well not everyone will have unlimited data, and not everyone will be using their phones for internet, favouring some other device instead, and out of those, not everyone will have tethering options. But really it is, like the article says, symbolic. It's a piece of technological and societal progress that we've subsequently regressed. Imagine, for instance, if our TV broadcasts were to all be taken back to 480p resolution, or to black and white. Functionally, the service would still work, and everyone would still be able to watch Celebrity Dancing On Broken Glass In The Jungle, or Misery Street. But you'd be hard-pressed not to think "we've taken a step backwards here".
You’d still have some lemons claiming it’s fine because *everyone can watch it in HD on their phones anyway.*
This service probably costs tens of millions. I'm not sure this is the best way to help people if I'm honest. If you want to listen or watch something on a train download it before you leave.
Probably? There are many things which make journeys nicer, this is one of them.
Christ, does anyone bother with home broadband when we all have internet on our phones with no hassle? Just seems like a waste of money
Can’t tell if this is sarcasm?
> I don't understand the outrage at all. Left = more government & public services. Even those that aren't needed.
Right = accepting shit, despite the fact that a better way is not only possible, but is currently being done by plenty of other countries. Also would this not be a private service, since the trains aren't publicly owned?
Sorry my comment wasn't trying to make a left vs right argument, but simply explaining why people on this left leaning sub seem to care so much.
Yeh that's not why people care. Nobody is against this because they want all private trains to have government WiFi because more public service = good. It's because it's another example of our country accepting subpar services, despite the fact that we're a very rich country and the technology for this has been readily available for years. It's like saying people who are against potholes in roads just want more government services. What people want is an appropriate standard of service for one of the world's richest nations.
Same, I stopped bothering with trying to use it years ago
Yeah, I never had any joy with the train Wifi - and since 4G became a thing I've found my own connection to be far superior. However, it would be nice if we would just stop fucking half-arsing everything in this country and actually knuckle down a bit.
[удалено]
How does WiFi on planes work, the same way? I can understand overland flights maybe but long haul, how does that work?!
I always assumed satellite like the cruise ships? Surely it’s not long range radio
Dunno. I went to usa in January and watched people using it. Maybe its a bit slow but seemed to function. I wasn't paying 90 quid to find out.
Lol that's a fair bit of hyperbole there. Last month I was flying internationally at it was only £5 for the whole flight (for wi-fi access).
It’s not outrageously expensive but you’d be better off flushing the money down the toilet because plane wifi is absolutely atrocious. You pay the money and then spend the rest of the flight trying to get anything to actually load.
It was fine for messaging or browsing web pages. Not useful for video streaming applications though.
I had trouble even sending WhatsApp messages but sounds like mileage varies.
It works in 2 ways – firstly satcoms, secondly it can talk to the cell network if it's over land. It's a lot easier for planes as they will generally have uninterrupted LOS to the satellites or cell towers, whereas a train is on the ground and often doesn't have clear LOS.
Yeah it’s satellite, interestingly the whole shortwave spectrum would fit into a single 5GHz band wifi channel with room to spare and other kinds of radio wave can’t travel over the horizon usually. The bandwidth is really crappy on shortwave which is why it’s only any good for text, grainy images, and AM radio broadcasting which uses less bandwidth than FM. Some long distance yachtsmen still use shortwave to communicate with the shore and other boats as satellite internet is still so expensive, you can use voice or there’s a service that receives emails over shortwave and forwards them on over the internet.
> How does WiFi on planes work, the same way? No. Cell tower coverage basically doesn't go up - complete waste of capacity. Also, transmission is limited by speed of the mobile party; airplanes are too fast. I know there are satellite providers for internet in the air, no idea if alternatives exist. You could have cell towers that point up, but I doubt that that's what's happening for internet.
Some googling suggests that airplanes do in fact use air-to-ground data communication. Cell towers were mentioned, too. As per above, I have my doubts that they are the same towers we use with our mobile phones, but I truly don't know.
Possibly using the same towers (although nowhere near as many of them - you wouldn't need to, because of the line of sight a plane has) but a different antenna and frequency allocation.
Two ways: 1. Via phone towers like trains. They have a high strength antenna on the belly of the aircraft that quickly roams between phone towers it happens to fly over. 2. Less commonly, satellite. There's an antenna on the roof that communicates with satellites in orbit. Obviously works better for long-haul flights over water.
I think some of them use satellites, I bet SpaceX and similar are going to clean up that market because they’ll be so much better than the existing options.
Icomera or nomad? I used to work at one of them a few years ago
Oh God, if they're now just not bothering to provide things which have been shit we'll soon have no trains!
My train commute is mostly in tunnels. I'll take shit wifi over no service any day.
Train wifi doesn’t work in tunnels either. It works roughly the same way your phone works but is _supposed_ to have longer range and be faster… but I find that actually my phone gets better connection than the train wifi.
It could work in tunnels, they [have that on the tube](https://tfl.gov.uk/campaign/station-wifi)
Yea but if it works in tunnels, mobile should too.
Why doesn’t it work in tunnels? Other countries manage it.
Because in Britain we just gaffa tape a 3G Huawei dongle on the roof of the buffet cart.
Because train internet is mobile internet, which doesn't reach into tunnels without repeaters in the tunnels. Do you know how other countries manage it? To be honest unless the tunnel is long it may not matter because a brief interruption won't cause much disruption to a lot of applications.
On the rare occasion that train wifi has worked for me it’s stopped working in the tunnels.
TfL trials show that you can get great signal with a leaky feeder down a tunnel. Out of tunnels it’s hard to believe that filling in the coverage gaps could be all that difficult. You could then have genuinely useful 4g and WiFi coverage which would allow people to get work done during journeys. Of course it’s cheaper just to scrap it, as the article notes.
Yep I commute to London on SWR and the WiFi is shit, it's 4G coverage is spottier than my phone and it blocks content streaming.
You can tell when you're close to Worplesdon because the entire carriage drops their phone call and stares at browser loading pages for about five minutes.
i use a vpn and that lets me stream content on train wifi. though it feels selfish to use up all the bandwidth on an already meagre line that others want to use too. so i usually only do it if the trains aren't busy.
Have done so myself but as the connection drops off so often on my route vpn becomes unusable aswell
ah, that sucks. 😞
Well the Wi-Fi is probably coming from the same 4G masts anyway. It's not like the train is plugged in. Sure, the antenna is bigger, but the Wi-Fi isn't exactly fully reliable or fast either. Just improve the 4G and 5G coverage along the lines and get rid of the Wi-Fi middleman.
You're lucky to get 4g. I can barely get 4g in most places these days, coverage is patchy at best. I went to Sweden over Christmas and had perfect 4g everywhere I went.
Same. I take the train nearly every day, and then I've also taken it many times on longer trips. I've never used the train wifi.
It's not necessarily about the practical effect, but the symbolic nature. Our neighbours and international community provide these services to their citizens because they see value. Companies offer it not as a luxury but as a standard. It's completely symbolic if the backward trajectory we now seem to be on.
Indeed it’s utterly woeful. Is there anyone who actually uses it? I’ve tried it several times and each time got ZERO data. Even where you pay for it cross country it’s horrendous. I did once, and got a horrible rate so never touched it ever again. My own mobile hotspot is always significantly more reliable. If it was actually a good connection people would use it, but it isn’t. It just feels like it’s a scam. The only time I have got good wifi in a train was Heathrow Express.
It was literally just a data capture exercise as it offered no real service
This. More annoying trying to use it than not having it.
I used to work as the technical engineer for a 40 year old fleet of trains. Getting WiFi installed was a nightmare, but once it was in it cost two parts of FA and we never had to do more than turn it off and on again if it broke. There's a lot of inefficiencies in the railways, but this isn't it.
I shared this article with a peer and their response was: “I guess in comparison with the train actually turning up at all, turning up on time, being the right size, going to where it says it's going, seat reservations actually working and it not costing a fucking small fortune, in comparison wifi is not a priority.”
I'm curious what the inefficiencies are, can you explain more about them? (Not doubting they exist, bit I curious what they are)
>Treasury Brain is a crippling psychological condition that leaves its victims tragically unable to read both sides of a balance sheet. So impaired are sufferers’ decision-making that it’s only a matter of time before one sells their home to cut down on heating bills. There is currently an outbreak at the Department for Transport (DfT), which is engaged in an extensive programme of making Britain’s railways very slightly cheaper, at the tiny cost of making the experience of travelling on them significantly worse. The latest edict from the department to rail operators, as reported by the one-time London mayoral candidate Christian Wolmar on the Calling All Stations podcast, is that they should stop offering wi-fi unless they can justify it financially. “Our railways are currently not financially sustainable, and it is unfair to continue asking taxpayers to foot the bill,” a government spokesperson told the Guardian in response to the story. “Passenger surveys consistently show that on-train wi-fi is low on their list of priorities.” >That may well be true: if someone asked me my top priorities for a functioning railway, I doubt I’d say “wi-fi” and more likely opt “for water to come out of the tap in the loos when I press the button”. Both these are things whose absence, however, feels immensely irritating, and if a decent internet connection doesn’t occupy the same rank on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as functional plumbing it’s still useful if you’re the sort of person who travels a lot for work, or, hey, if you’re the sort of person who just wants to watch a video on their phone. >All this fits into a pattern of budget squeezes that has also featured numerous cuts to services and frequencies, as the end of the franchise system has allowed the Treasury to tighten its grip. This always felt an odd sort of way to run a railway, even when passenger numbers were still below pre-pandemic levels thanks to the rise of working from home – if you want to attract more passengers, wouldn’t you make services better? But now the numbers are at an all-time high it looks actively bizarre. I’m beginning to suspect that Rishi Sunak, who takes private jets whenever he can – who has gutted HS2, and last week dropped Boris Johnson-era plans for significant railway reform – just doesn’t like trains. (I bet you anything there’s wi-fi on those planes.) >Losing wi-fi is not as big a blow as losing services, but it feels sort of symbolic of the miserable, pinched country that Treasury Brain is creating. Other countries invest in their infrastructure and public realm; their railway networks use on-board wi-fi as a selling point. Here, though, we deal not in assets but in costs, and the possibility it might be worth spending money to make things a little bit better is as baffling to the government as the idea that more railway journeys might be seen as a good thing. In Tory Britain, everything, in every way, must constantly be getting worse. But it might also cost the state less money. So who’s to say whether it’s good or bad?
I'm more amazed that Mobile network operators have still not managed to get signal in place across some of most busiest routes in the country.
It's mainly down to how rail lines are usually built into the landscape, they're often intentionally occluded by embankments to prevent or minimise noise pollution to the surrounding environment. Unfortunately this is also an excellent way to block radio signals.
I guess following the shallowest gradient usually means they are behind hills and in valleys.
And when they're not in natural valleys, they build up artificial embankments
They didnt build up artificial valleys, they dug cuttings.
I spend all day looking at the rail network and honestly it's very rare you come across earthworks solely for noise pollution. When rail is in cutting it's normally because that's how you had to do it to keep the track gradient as flat as possible. The majority of the track alignment in this country is the same as it was in the 19th century, with probably about 90% the same as pre WW2. They weren't building sound attenuation measures then
It's less about noise and more about appeasing rich 19th century landowners who didn't want their views "ruined"... Of course, you don't have to look much into the "controversy" over HS2 to see the exact same attitudes from today's rich landowners.
Things can be two things
Not to mention the trains act as a faraday cage making it harder for the radio signals to reach the receiver
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism. The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes. The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India, which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
> this is despite the fact that a lot of rail lines have existing fibre optic running alongside them It's not like you can just splice into the fibre a 4g transmitter. They'd have to lay fresh cable.
The National Rifle Association (NRA) was founded in London in 1859. It is a sporting body that promotes firearm safety and target shooting. The National Rifle Association does not engage in political lobbying or pro-gun activism. The original (British) National Rifle Association has no relationship with the National Rifle Association of America, which was founded in 1871 and has focussed on pro-gun political activism since 1977, at the expense of firearm safety programmes. The National Rifle Association of America has no relationship with the National Rifle Association in Britain (founded 1859); the National Rifle Association of Australia; the National Rifle Association of New Zealand nor the National Rifle Association of India, which are all non-political sporting oriented organisations. It is important not to confuse the National Rifle Association of America with any of these other Rifle Associations. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
> you just need to overcome a minor bit of doppler shift I mean at 125 mph the doppler shift of a 1920 MHz signal is less than 360 Hz, which is somewhat less than LTE channel spacing...
One of the great mistakes that people often make is to think that any organisation called'"National Rifle Association' is a branch or chapter of the National Rifle Association of America. This could not be further from the truth. The National Rifle Association of America became a political lobbying organisation in 1977 after the Cincinnati Revolt at their Annual General Meeting. It is self-contined within the United States of America and has no foreign branches. All the other National Rifle Associations remain true to their founding aims of promoting marksmanship, firearm safety and target shooting. This includes the original NRA in the United Kingdom, which was founded in 1859 - twelve years before the NRA of America. It is also true of the National Rifle Association of Australia, the National Rifle Association of New Zealand, the National Rifle Association of India, the National Rifle Association of Japan and the National Rifle Association of Pakistan. All these organisations are often known as "the NRA" in their respective countries. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
I don't see how timing would matter - it manifests as doppler shift. You can't get out-of-order arrivals this way, for example. Handing over connections is important and one reason why mobile phones don't work on planes, but cell towers are spaced so that handover can take place for phones travelling at normal speeds like in a car or on a train.
It’s always going to be shit moving between cell towers. Mobile networks aren’t really suitable for internet on trains, the tech is moving towards smaller cells so will probably be even worse in future.
Go anywhere in Europe and witness a quality of public transport so good you'll think you're in some sort of Star Fleet esque utopia.
It's definitely a lot better largely but it's not all rosey. Germany is a bit of a shitshow at the moment.
To quote someone who I know lived in Germany for a bit, you quickly learn what "Ausfallen" means. Oddly Italy seems to have sussed out public transport and trains, minus the occasional fire.
I live in Cologne and German trains are the worst
I once got off a flight into Manchester and my train was in the station. There was another in 20 minutes and I smoke so decided to miss that one and have my first fag in like eight hours or something. Worst decision ever. Was sat around for three hours until all the staff went home, announced all trains were cancelled and told us taxis were on their way. I was sat with a German guy for some of this who was headed to Leeds, same as I was. The most surprising words I have ever heard were "it's better than Germany".
I visited Copenhagen and that put Merseyrail to show. The train felt like something straight out Star Trek. Even the buses were miles better; 3 doors (front, middle and back) and you "pay" by swiping your oyster-equivalent as you hop on. Fast, clean and efficient.
I was in Austria and the trains were immaculate. They looked as if they had been put into service that day. Also had displays telling you what connections were available and times of departure at each station as you approached. TGV in France is phenomenal!
I love how TGV literally translates to "Very Fast Train"
In Norway you don’t need to swipe, buy a ticket on an app for the day/week/month and there are no barrier or checks on any bus tram or tube.
Honestly when I was in Copenhagen I thought the London Underground was definitely better. The Copenhagen metro was expensive (like everything in Copenhagen is), had few seats (and they were not comfortable), did not have as wide a coverage across the city despite it being way smaller than London, and was certainly no better in terms of congestion. Of course it's better than the rest of the country outside of London, but comparing capital to capital I definitely think the Underground is better overall. Of course there are issues w/ the Underground that Copenhagen doesn't have just because of how old it is (e.g., shitty ventilation on some of the lines, occasional deafening screeches) but even considering that the Underground is still one of the best in the world.
Sometimes in Italy the stations look like something out of an old film. Then you get [a train like this](https://trainspo.com/photo/87510/) coming through to Milan. Meanwhile the [local trains](https://trainspo.com/photo/18621/?list=class) might not be ultra luxurious at times, but there are enough carriages to suit the demand.
Ask any German and they'll laugh if you claim their trains are good. Not an excuse for us but the current economic model is making things worse for many
Yeah well see if they prefer Northern Rail.
> anywhere in Europe I rode a train in Romania and it was pretty fucking awful.
I rode a long distance one. It was huge and Soviet, you had to climb up onto the thing from a low platform. But. It was on time, I got a big seat, it was cheap, and the loo worked (admittedly it was a hole directly onto the track… but functional !)
Relative to our National Rail much of Europe does better but the Underground is definitely up there with the best, as is the London bus system. I've been on the Berlin and Copenhagen metros and I don't think either were better than the Underground. The rest of the country bar a couple of places (I heard Nottingham has pretty good public transport but I've never been there...) is pretty dire though, yes.
Cheaper, sure... But quality wise, not really. In most of Europe a one-per-hour service is "high frequency" and there are _plenty_ of trains using coaches from the 1960s/70s with varying levels of refurbishment. Once you get away from the high-speed lines, pretty much nothing operates above 75mph. One of the "benefits" of the UK's penny-pinching strategy of stretching 19th-century infrastructure instead of building new is that speeds of 100mph or so are pretty ubiquitous on "main lines".
Where do you think we sold all our old, crap rolling stock?
To Northern Rail. Cant sell what you don't own: https://www.forbes.com/sites/davekeating/2019/08/15/almost-all-british-train-lines-are-now-owned-by-other-eu-countries/
Northern Rail retired its last Pacer in 2020. Though they may have been replaced with other crap rolling stock of course. Fact remains those trains get sold abroad.
It's absurd. Of course people are going to say reliability, punctuality and cost when asked about priorities. To then say people aren't bothered about WiFi is just incorrect. They are bothered, just the rest is more important and currently more shit.
Wi-Fi on train does not help if the train doesn’t turn up ! But if it does turn up, then at least you can post that your still going to be late..
It's all to stop you replanning your journey when train is increasingly delayed, stop you making a delay repay claim when sat on the train after the cancelled one you planned to get.
Could this also be a minor step in the plan to reduce working from home? So people "can't work on trains" either? (assuming no 4G available...)
I found it hilarious that it doesnt come as standard to have a charge on trains from london to Manchester. I also had a really rough time getting there with delays so i didnt pay for the return. Merci for the free ride Avanti
Ha! Like it makes any difference. Never once have I connected to train WiFi and had it work. It is beyond ridiculous how poor this bit of infrastructure is in London. We spend so much time commuting and are cutoff from the internet for this time period
You know the wifi is utter sh*t when it’s still faster to download a webpage using your mobile phone signal
I remember travelling abroad and being shocked the train company was handing out water for free. Make of that what you will
The UK desperately needs some ambition. I mean we can't freeze time, we are going to need to invest to grow...or even stand still.
Or it's a sign that everyone has enough mobile data that they don't want to give out their personal details to log into a WiFi connection that won't be any better? There's little point in offering a service that people aren't using.
[удалено]
The Wi-Fi is not exactly fully reliable either. Remember, it's just using the cell towers anyway - the train isn't plugged in to the Internet via a really long fibre. Sure, the antenna is bigger, but it would be much better to just improve the 4G and 5G coverage that everyone is using anyway and cut out the middleman.
Well, there's also the fact that we don't all have laptops with SIM slots.
But you can use your phone as a hotspot (and more and more long distance trains have charging sockets at the seat).
Sure, if you don't have anywhere important to be and don't mind burning through your battery lol.
That's why I use a phone with a USB-C charger. My laptop and phone can be charged with the same cable plugged in below the seat. Not sure of any trains to and from London without power.
Plenty don't - it's the long distance trains that have power and so on. Thameslink doesn't in my experience.
> Mobile signal is not consistent along our railways But the trains are just using 4G anyway. If your signal isn't consistent, then nor will the trains be. Perhaps thats where the investment should be? Ensuring there are masts along the routes.
It certainly should be, but acceptance of 5G masts is.....not widespread.
We're talking about long a rail line not in the centre of a quaint village.
I know. They don't run through some mysterious no-mans land miles from anywhere.
No, lots of intercity train lines don’t have mobile data coverage between cities (no telecom provider is going to waste money putting up 4g towers in the countryside) so during train journeys people regularly lose internet connection. Theoretically, on-board wifi could provide a more stable connection (because you can fit a larger antenna on a train as opposed to a phone, so train wifi should have longer range) but in practice it’s just as crap, if not worse, than just using mobile data from your phone. People would definitely use the on-board wifi if it actually worked.
>no telecom provider is going to waste money putting up 4g towers in the countryside Except all the ones in mainland Europe where, intercity or otherwise, decent public transport WiFi is a given.
Ah but they're all filthy commies you see...
Merseyrails new trains came with WiFi as standard for the first time. I remember getting on one for the first time and the damn thing didn't work. The login never actually showed up so it was comeptlely useless. Why bother touting wifi if it won't fucking work
in other countries a) the train wifi connection works and/or b) the mobile signal strength is not 1 bar anywhere, never mind along arterial train lines. we're so rubbish!
Especially since the wifi signups aren't even slightly GDPR compliant with their mandatory acceptance of marketing emails and lack of privacy policies (last time I tried to read one, it just redirected back to the signup page; i.e. you can only read it once you've connected)... Pretty sure your entire browsing record with attached personal details are up for sale. But since it's not "the Internet" as such, companies don't seem to think that data protection law applies and the ICO certainly doesn't care. There's also the fact that nobody is going to consider it worthwhile to spend 5-10 minutes signing up for these things unless the journey is at least an hour.
I was registered for years under [email protected]
Someone's signed up on SWR as '[email protected]'.
[email protected] was my address of choice. Maybe I'm more genteel than you. Back in the day I used to give websites which demanded a phone number (for some reason) the number for Hastings Direct.
I always go for `[email protected]`
Not sure when you last went on a train but for the most part mobile signal is horrendous when you are travelling via one. The wifi wasn’t great but was something, and people absolutely are using.
> personal details You mean a fake email address? I actually don't have enough mobile data to tether my laptop on train journeys. But you're right that we could do.
There are plenty of older people who don't have good data agreements who would need to use the wifi. Plus you don't have to enter your real personal details just say your name is "dghisdfis dfhisds" and your email is [email protected] or whatever (I feel bad for whoever actually owns that account).
perhaps, but not that many people use Wifi anymore. I've happily shared a phone data hotspot with other people that needed wifi for their device but didn't have any data. But there isn't a widespread culture of asking others for wifi.
One simple question, is the cost to provide it more than the benefit to the economy of all the extra work people do on their commute?
Yes
I commute from Nottingham to London and essentially have zero internet the whole way. It’s ridiculous when I’m Switzerland I can be climbing up a mountain and have fast internet the whole way. It would make my commute so much better being able to work.
The Treasury has fought tooth and nail to ring fence road spending whilst descoping the fuel escalator formula despite every forecast saying we need to reduce car use. Cycling funding slashed. Bus funding stagnant. It’s only only a ‘balance sheet’ issue for modes not of interest.
Someone clearly did the maths of how much could go on dividends if they canned the WiFi. Case closed
Unfortunately this is the typical "knows the cost of everything but value of nothing" kind of thinking that's so rife at the moment.