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Recently travelling on high-speed European trains, I have achieved my life goals. I logged on to WiFi well. For a few minutes I read the news and sent me a few emails. The connection will then be cut off again.
The wifi on the train is almost uniformly awful. Train companies advertise the joy of onboard connections, but taking them with that word is destined to refresh your browser meaninglessly. Of course, the symbol on your laptop claims you are connected: it is a hope that kills you.
Decades ago, we first apologised to our mobile phone “I’m on the train.” Now we still need to text messages to the same effect.
So what is missing? There are three fundamental challenges, said Federico Protto, head of Italian operations at CellNex, the operator of Europe’s largest mobile tower. The train travels very quickly (about 200 miles for European highway services), with many people demanding lots of bandwidth, and each metal carriage is a type of Faraday cage that makes mobile signals difficult to penetrate.
Additionally, the focus is on urban areas as mobile operators have built their networks. Trains that pull wifi from mobile signals travel through rural areas with few antennas. After leaving London St. Pancras, Eurostar loses his phone connection before entering the Channel Tunnel.
The solution includes more mobile towers. The faster you move, the more intense the delivery of one tower to another. CellNex calculates that a tower will be required for every kilometer of the railway track for excellent connections on high-speed trains. This takes into consideration how much bandwidth a passenger will bore if it can be streamed to heart content. For comparison, SNCF, the French national train operator, says its WiFi (which limits the amount that passengers can stream) depends on one tower every 3km. I might explain that I couldn’t get online between Paris and Lyon.
There are many options for expanding coverage. According to the plot, one possibility is that one mobile operator will build all the towers, which will be converted to WiFi using antennas on the roof of the train. Another is that instead of WiFi, all mobile operators build 4G and 5G networks along the rail line, with passengers primarily not using this.
In many of Japan’s fresh bullet lines, 5G coverage is so good that only tourists (without endless mobile data) need WiFi. However, Icomera UK, which offers train WiFi, says that only 4G and 5G will have a hard time solving the problem given the cage effect of Faraday. It also points out that countries with good signalling such as Sweden and Germany are also investing in onboard WiFi.
Another question is who should pay for this? The London Underground is rolling out 4G and 5G, which are indirectly funded by UK mobile operators.
However, European operators may not want to pay to build towers connected by fiber optic cables along the entire railway network. For example, Italian railways are over 10,000 miles.
Are there any cases where train operators pay? The operation of an internet connection can be a boon for long-distance train travel. If executives know that it’s like working in a cafe, they’re much more likely to sit for four hours (London to Amsterdam), four and a half hours (Paris to Zurich to Zurich), and even six hours (London to Frankfurt). That means you can not only be able to hotspot intermittently through your mobile phone, but you can also ensure that you can participate in team meetings and client calls. Currently, some Shinkansen trains have private cabins to facilitate video calls.
In the UK, in 2023 there was a push in other directions. To save money, transporters have simply considered disposing of free WiFi on the train. They noted that passengers are more concerned about the value of money and reliability than connectivity. Momentum is now shaking towards more connectivity. Icomera UK estimates that improving connectivity across UK trains would cost around £200 million.
Meanwhile, EuroStar, which relies on 3G and 4G signals for WiFi, with 5G unavailable, says improving services this year is the “focus.” In Germany, the government is promoting “seamless 5G” in railways. Starting from the 280km Hamburg-Berlin route, along which Germany Baan plans to install 265 5G masts.
But be careful what you want. Imagine a world where train passengers (especially the most important passengers) can seamlessly log in to Zoom calls or stream short videos without headphones. What is the chance that people like me go from people complaining about wifi complaining that it is?
