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On the wrong track - Internet on trains hits the buffers

Nov 23rd 2016, 15:43 by B.R.

THE train is often the best way to travel for business. Anyone heading to Paris

from London for a meeting, for example, would be mad to choose an Airbus over a

Eurostar. The journey time by rail may be more than twice as long two hours and

forty minutes compared with an hour and a quarter in the air but that doesn t

take into account the fact that passengers must mope about the airport for a

couple hours before boarding their flight. (Eurostar suggests turning up 30-45

minutes before the train leaves; for domestic trains you just need a few

minutes.) Furthermore, unlike St Pancras station and Gare du Nord, Heathrow and

Charles de Gaulle are some distance from the centre of town. In fact passengers

will probably need to board a train to get there.

But time-saving is the least of it. In most instances, travelling by rail is

simply more pleasant. Assuming that they have booked a seat and don't have to

squat in the aisles, passengers get more space, get a full-size window through

which they can watch the world fly by and are able to get up and wander about.

They may even get a table big enough to allow them to spread out their papers,

laptop and a sandwich at the same time. Compare that with the stress of making

it through airport security and strapping yourself into a cramped plane, and

those uneasy moments when your tablet and Bloody Mary must fight for space on a

tiny tray-table. Gulliver would happily endure an hour or two extra on his

total journey to give that a miss.

Sometimes trains, though, fail to ram home their advantage. Take free Wi-Fi.

For a start, it is often not free. Virgin Trains, for example, offers 15

minutes gratis and then charges standard-fare passengers 5 ($6.20) for a day s

access. Even so, the service is pretty patchy. The system simply relays the

signal from 3G masts as the train whizzes past. The firm accepts that this

means there are plenty of deadspots, and that often low bandwidth means that

there is plenty of buffering to endure.

In 2014, the government was supposed to legislate such problems away. It made

offering fast, cheap internet access a condition of bidding for a rail

franchise. It even stumped up 50m for some operators to help them on their

way. Alas, the devil seems to be in the detail. The Guardian reports that the

minimum speed requirement is to be set at 1 megabit per second (Mbps) per

passenger; enough to update a Twitter status, but not much else.

Whether operators will go further off their own bat remains to be seen. Virgin

says it is spending 53m to improve connection on its trains. Eurostar, has

started to offer Wi-Fi, but only on its new rolling stock, which is being

introduced gradually. And tellingly, it suggests that passengers will be able

to e-mail, tweet and post all the way using any Wi-Fi enabled phone, tablet or

laptop . No mention there of anything that might require a bit more bandwidth.

Planes often have rubbish Wi-Fi too, of course. But given all the other

advantages that train firms hold, a fast, reliable internet connection might

help them to attract business travellers on journeys even longer than London to

Paris and back. Time enough for a second Bloody Mary. After all, why waste the

space?