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40Mbps is actually not out of the question with good LTE coverage.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.)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.
But you really don't need anywhere near that much to silence the complaints about the current performance of the system. The restrictions in place now aren't likely to be lifted when LTE is rolled out, as they have to be set for the worst case scenario, or things will get a lot worse than they are now when the train looses LTE coverage.