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First UK On-Train WiFi Service Launches Monday
dave writes "UK train company GNER starts trials of the UK's first on-train wireless Internet access service. Currently only available on limited services and in First Class; if the trial is successful the service will be rolled out across the entire fleet in both Standard and First Class."
I've seen one go by while I was at the train station on day waiting for the commuter train but it was going by a bit too quickly for me to try to grab a connection with my axim x3i :P
To be fair, a relatively small number of day-to-day problems are caused by the train companies, the majority of difficulties stemming from network problems.
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Windows XP. From the people who brought you Edlin.
I've been riding the trains in the UK for the past 6 months ish and I don't understand what people's problem with them is. If they are delayed it is almost never more than 10 minutes and if it is greater than 10 minutes it's usually due to something weird like lightning hitting the tracks or some other thing. 9 times out of 10 your train is never delayed and you don't run into problems.
;). The 4 hour train ride to London would be much much much easier to deal with if I could have my precious intarweb with me.
To me, as an american, the trains are fan-fucking-tastic. American mass transportation systems can't come close to the ease and convience that the British get from the train system. Personally, I love it. Get on whatever train you want come back on whatever train you want at any time. It's great.
Now, for me, I want wireless and I want it now
I recall reading about Amtrak working with yahoo to provide net access on the trains.. I don't know if it panned out, and google searches just come up with old articles. Anyone know what happened?
Looking now, I see that the local train is testing wifi on certain routes.
http://www.linx.no/default.aspx?id=2096
Correct my if I'm wrong, but weren't three of those caused by track problems, and isn't the train company independent of the track company? And the other crash was caused by a car on the tracks. So no, it's not disgusting for the train company to be looking at WiFi.
We use mph in the UK and our high speed trains - the type which GNER operate - run at 125mph. The road speed limit is 70mph btw so it's not that likely :o)
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
Here is a link (PDF). Sorry it's in French but I can't find one in English. Here is the Google translation of the HTML version.
No GNU has been Hurd during the making of this comment.
The technology for this is provided by Icomera. There are some more data about what their technology does, though not really much about how it works. Their speciality seems to be "Seamless Handover" between the different types of network connection.
If intelligent life is too complex to evolve on its own, who designed God?
"Taking long distance freight off the roads and putting it back onto rail where it belongs would be a major vote winner I reckon." Not to the people who actually ship that freight and don't want to be at the mercy of the rail unions again. If even the Post Office have found that it's cheaper to ship letters by road than by rail, there's no hope of people choosing to send their frieght by train again. As for trucks on the road, the problem is not the trucks, the problem is that for decades now the government has refused to build proper roads that can handle modern traffic. Of the 40-ish billion pounds a year they collect from motoring taxes, only about 20% actually gets spent on the roads: it's no wonder they're crap too.
I agree - whenever I catch sight of a TDS screen, the information is far more useful to me than the CIS (Customer mis-Information System) that powers the platform screens and indicators -assuming they haven crashed (most of the time) or aren't displaying an MS Windows error dialogue!
They should deinately have a web front end to the TDS maps.
Why can't women be like Hedy Lamarr - beautiful, talented and inventors of frequency-hopping spread-spectrum techn
Hat you read the GNER web site carefully, you would see that it is only installed in one coach of one train, and at the speed they would normally pass, you would be unlikely to have time to achieve a connection anyway.
The last drunk TRAIN driver to kill passengers was ar Eltham Well Hall on 11th June 1972. They kill 1000 on the roads every year. A sleeping ROAD VEHICLE driver caused the Great Heck aka Selby crash. There are less than 2 broken rails on the entire network each day, the chances of one affecting a GNER train are not very great. If you actually take a GNER train from London to Edinburgh, it will, apart from station stops, normally drop below 60mph at two places, Newcastle and Morpeth, due to very tight curvature. Newcastle is a station stop anyway. It will cover most of the distance at 100 to 125mph. I know, I have done the journey many times. Have you?