I gather that it's only available on the Acela at present??? I'd love to have it on the AT, but that's probably way too much wishful thinking, and too difficult logistics wise, along the CSX route.
WiFi is available on the following trains listed on the website. Well, its available until several hundred other people try to use it at the same time and when the nearest cell phone towers can handle the data load from a passing train.
Coast Starlight has WiFi.
I don't know if it would be possible to have WiFi on the entire Auto Train route. If it's the same dependence as my cell/Blackberry (Verizon 3G), then there are a lot of gaps along the way. And it's not reliable if it can fade out on you en-route. I would imagine some new towers would have to be installed, at great expense.
It worked for me for about half the trip.
Precisely. -_-
One partial solution for cell phone coverage, is have the server in the cafe cars access multiple vendors; Verizon, AT&T. So if the train is passing through a dead area for Verizon, use AT&T if it there is a signal. This will only go so far, as the trains on tracks well away from the major roads are likely to be passing through poor cell coverage areas.
That's exactly what does happen, the system is setup with cards from all the major carriers. And it moves between the cards that at any given moment have the strongest signal. This while never providing 100% continuous coverage, will probably work for a large majority of Amtrak's LD trains. The biggest problems are see are the Coast Starlight in Oregon, the Zephyr in the Rockies, the Cardinal in New River Gorge, and a large part of the Empire Builder's route.
We're talking about hundreds of passengers per train here, many of whom already have some sort of wireless device ready to fire up should a usable signal ever arrive. Does each train have dozens of separate access points on each of the major networks to give the users a fighting chance of a useful signal? I have tried every major carrier (AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, T-Mobile) along the Sunset Limited route and received little or no service no matter the card or provider. So far as I can tell it's not even close to being ready for dozens or possibly hundreds of users at once and there is little incentive for the network carriers to install more towers for trains that run once a day at most and only once every few days in the case of Union Pacific's Sunset Route.
The CCJPA (Capitol Corridor) has an excellent high-level description of how the system works on their website:
Yep. WiFi on a moving LD train is simply an unworkable idea.
The Acela provides 25% of Amtrak's ticket revenue while carrying around 11% of the total passengers. The Acela with 3.38 million passengers in FY2011 accounted for around 31% of the passengers traveling between endpoints on the NEC, so that is not the source of the 25% number. The reporter was stating what the Amtrak spokesman said. Since it was not a direct quote, the reported either messed up summarizing what was said or the Amtrak representative mis-spoke.
WiFi works just fine on moving trains and buses in many other places in the world, and for cryin' out loud it even works on planes with 500 passengers in it. So what is so special about our trains that makes it an unworkable idea? Heck even my 3G/4G MiFi service works just fine when there is signal. The issue is of making signals more available along the RoW.
Thanks for that link. The explains exactly what the problem is: the units do not currently have support for 4G. I manage a fleet of buses that have WiFi service. Our WiFi became almost unusably slow on our most popular routes, until we upgraded to 4G LTE a few months back. Now, as long as the bus is in a 4G area (which is also where the largest percentage of ridership is) the service works great, even with a large number of users on it. 4G LTE will result is a large speed increase along the areas with the highest ridership, so things should improve noticeably on the NEC.
Backhaul was a major issue during the initial 3G roll-outs and continues to be a problem outside of major metro areas where most of Amtrak's LD network lies.
Most of the internet implementations you see on US flights are not part of any satellite link. They're from ground based skyward facing antennas. There are some in-flight technologies that use expensive satellite links for data, but that's not what you're buying on most US flights. In many cases both technologies suffer the same interruptions anyway, probably because there is little financial benefit to blanketing the world's oceans with high speed internet access. On a flight to nearby Puerto Rico we lost both tower based internet and satellite based television as the plane left the US mainland.
I did find it interesting that I could take the bus to Montpelier and have a better connection than I had on Amtrak out west.
Your question is answered in the article itself: airlines force you to pay for wi-fi service. That weeds out people who may use wi-fi if it's free to casually browse the Web, but wouldn't see it worth paying for. Amtrak doesn't have that filter, so everyone that wants to use it has access to it. You would probably need close to a 40Mbps connection consistently to provide for the wants of 500 rail passengers, and even then people will be frustrated. (The college here has 80Mbps with 1100ish students, and there's still bandwidth issues and demand for more bandwidth.)
