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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")."
If only they had this in Canada. I used to take the train several times a month for 5 hour trips, and interent would have been real nice for working on assignments using my laptop. Instead, I had to work offline, then quickly connect for about 30seconds to update stuff when we would pull into a station. This could be very handy if more places start implementing it.
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From time to time I travel on train for a few hours. On business class I can get an electric outlet for my laptop so it doesn't run out of power while I work. It is nice that I can get some work done in the train.
But it is really annoying to be disconnected from the net while I travel by train.
I wouldn't mind paying a bit extra for the ticket if I could have access to the net. (Well, I don't pay the ticket myself. But my company wouldn't mind paying either.)
Those Europeans get all the cool Train stuff........
Insert Pithy Quote here.
And if you work as a contractor..."travel time is billable time!"
If /. is going to link to auto-translated articles, I would prefer that the Google translator is used. Both because it translates fine and because it contains a link to the original text for those who understand the original language.
... wherease we get no trains. Bush is planning to cut all federal funds for Amtrak, which will pretty much kill it.
I want my uber-trains with wifi, darnit!
Accoding to the german version, a speaker (a guy talking, not an audio device) says that "in the future" train stations will be covered, at least those where the ICE trains stop (as opposed to just drive through). Currently only their "DB Lounges" are served by WLAN.
What keeps me going is my inertia.
Some of us are not constrained to speaking only English. Please link to the original language of an article and if someone wants to translate it, they can post a babelfish or other link in the comments.
As of the fall, Mobility was still being worked on. Certainly no hardware available. So I still wonder how they are going to do this. Maybe just don't intend to deploy all that soon.
Built in mobility support would only be needed if peoples laptops were connecting directly to the fixed routers. I imagine what they will do is have 802.11G to WiMax routers on the train and use MobileIP or NEMO or custom software to allow those routers to switch between fixed routers. The fixed routers and the train itself will probably have directional antennas to maximize the distance between fixed routers although they will need less directional antennas and routers spaced closer together on curved sections of track. The train may have more than one antenna (with its own transciever) with varying directionality so it can acheive maximum distance on straight sections of track and still see the fixed router on curved sections. They probably have fiber running the length of the track (many railroads already have this for signaling and other purposes) which they can use to connect the fixed routers to the internet. It might also be possible to use a continous dipole along the track with a diapole on top of the train transmitting a very week signal over a long distance (though signal strength may not be anywhere close to uniform along the length of the dipole). The router could also have a squid proxy to conserve upstream bandwidth though they may not have enough users on the train for this to be benificial
As an added benifit to the railroad, they could transmit GPS data and telemetry over the connection as well as send signals from dispatch telling the train to modify its speed so it doesn't have to stop at signals.
If they can only survive through government funding, Amtrak obviously isn't being used enough to merit its existence.
Great! Let's apply that logic to planes and cars.
Why shouldn't their funds be cut. Right now, a train ticket does not cost significantly less than a plane ticket.
That's because the infrastructure and operating expenses necessary for flying are heavily subsidized by the government (i.e., your and my tax dollars)
Traveling from one side of the US to the other takes a matter of hours by plane, but days by train (I've done it both ways).
That's because the US railroad infrastructure is thoroughly obsolete--it doesn't haev to be that slow.
Of course, for coast-to-coast trips, planes will remain significantly faster for some time to come, but planes could be competitive for the most heavily traveled routes, up and down along the coast, within the mid-west, and other regional trips.