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German Railways To Get WLAN RailNet
wertarbyte writes "According to the German IT news site Heise, german Telekom and the german railway corporation Deutsche Bahn have formed an alliance to equip the ICE high speed trains with WLAN access (Babelfish translation), as well as the stations those trains arrive at. This offer is aimed at business travellers, and will first be introduced on routes frequented by those ("travel time is usable time")."
From TFA: "In order to lead the data from and to the driving course to, the British set on a Wimax net along the distance, which is to?rtragen up to 32 MBit/s"
So they have a big Wimax router on the train which connects to several 802.11G routers throughout the train which give you your wireless.
Internet -> Wimax -> 802.11G -> Your Laptop
Whether or not the same pricing model would be carried over to the on-board access no one knows.
The same kind of thing was recently put into place on certain routes of the Washington State Ferries, one of which I use daily.
It's a really good idea, but I wonder if rail will have the same limitations I experience with our own system (boats).
Mobilisa's "Wireless Over Water" is cool- when we're in the slip or not too far from it. The trip I take is 35 minutes each way, the first 5-7 minutes and the last 5-7 minutes are awesome, but the whole time in between (from either Seattle or Bainbridge Island) is riddled with drop outs and disconnects.
Well, it's a boat in the middle of the water, you might say. Yes, but not really any different from a train that has to move between access points along its own route. If they put enough of them in, great, but on a bullet train how bad would it suck to have a drop out every few minutes while it moves from one hotspot to the next?
Yes of course the contractor implementing it will say that won't happen, but they said that about our in-commute Wi-Fi, too.
R(k)
Well since it is by T-Mobile i'm sure it will be part of the same service they have in the US http://www.t-mobile.com/services/hotspot/overview. asp
9 -_,00.html Hopefully that changes
So around $29.99 a month
Looking around the German site I don't see a monthly package. http://www.t-mobile.de/business/tarife/1,2279,380
VIA Rail already offers this serveice in Canada:e n_index.h tml
http://www.viarail.com/wirelessinternet/
Wi-Fi on the train, Internet heandled by 2 way to a Bell satellite
It would be cooler for them to use NEMO (Network Mobility) which defines a system where nodes within the network are fixed with respect to a given router, and where it is the routers that are mobile.
(In a technical and physical sense, this is exactly what they have.)
In terms of coverage, the ideal would be for a consortium of rail providers to get together and construct a uniform system across all countries in Europe. This likely won't happen, unless the German experiment is a success, but if it did, it would define THE de-facto standard for such networks, globally, and not just for trains.
(Airlines have looked at wireless systems, but AFAIK there is no real standard defined, even if such systems have ever been built. Again, though, a Mobile IP system is stupid, as you're hardly going to jump out of one aircraft and land in another. At least, not unless you're a stuntman, and then you probably won't be concentrating on XTank or BZFlag enough to care if the network connection stays up.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It is great. Access is free in the 1st class seats and the speed is good. I was travelling at 100mph on my way to London while IM chatting with friends in Canada.
It is available, at least in the Toronto-Montreal corridor. Only on VIA1 (first class) though.
There is another kind of evil which we must fear most, and that is the indifference of good men. -- Boondock Saints
If it's anything like the service in the UK on trains that are almost the same speed, it'll be free in First class and start at about €5 for half an hour in Standard class. Of course, it may differ for whatever reason.
IANAGerman but I can beat google on this one. Doing this quickly but I'm happy the content is right:
"accordinng to british media sources the british firm 't-mobile uk' plans to test this between london and brighton on the Southern Express in march and april.
To allow data in and out of the trains they're setting up a wimax network along that stretch of track that should provide up to 32mbps."
This has existed on the Linx train between Copenhagen and Gothenburg since July 2003. On that train, a rotating sattelite reciever/transmitter was placed on top of one of the cars of the train.
Linx has recently gone out of business and has been bought out by SJ (Swedish railways). SJ has also announced (Swedish article) that 85 of its trains will also be equipped with WLAN.
WiMAX has a theoretical bandwidth (warning: pdf, see pg 5) of about 4.5Mbps per 3.5Mhz channel (outdoors, range 15km)... so it will probably mean they utilize approximately 7 channels (= 31.5Mbps). Having 32Mbps per user would be an insane amount of bandwidth and channel usage. Of course it all depends on the details which are not provided...
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In the UK one of the operators, GNER, who serve the East Cost have been rolling this out over the past year, there is a link from the GNER Wi-Fi page Which explains who it works for them. A combination of satalite and mobile phone for when in tunnels
If you read a speed reading book, does it take you less time to read the second half?
...is WLAN-enabled and it has been for quite some time I think. The link to the outside world seems to be managed with the help of 3G and satellites. More info here
You can barely get a dialup flatrate for $29.99 a month in Germany, so I very much doubt that a new implementation of technology, into which T-Mobile Germany and German Rail has arguably poured a ton of research money into (that's their take, not mine), will cost anything less than an absolute premium.
T-Mobile Germany, remember, charges EUR8.00 an hour for their public hotspots. I am banking on a) having to pay considerably more money to use this than I would pay to use GPRS from the train and b) the service being pulled after a year or so because no-one will be using it because it is so damn expensive (this would fall completely in line with German Rail's idiot management strategy, which dictates that the only way to increase revenue is to raise prices.)
T-Mobile USA is obviously a subsidiary of T-Mobile Germany, but they are run in completely different ways. Forget about a monthly package -- it's not going to happen soon.
See also http://cms.lufthansa.com/fly/de/en/inf/0,4976,0-0- 1144177,00.html