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On Train WiFi

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Aictos

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Don’t know if this has been posted already but Cross County now offer free WiFi on their services on every train.

Which I be using next week, so I'm happy that they now offer free wifi to all - all they need to do now is offer plug sockets in Standard Class on their Class 170s.
 
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robbeech

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Did the trade unions in France recently put a stop to that recently?

If so, this is something that could happen in the UK, or if not, pay the workers for doing the work on the train.

I think more often than not people working on trains are working either because they’re being paid or are doing it because it helps them. If they’re on a commute and are being forced to do extra work at these times by employers then this needs to be addressed.
 

Aictos

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Some more good news for us 170 users.

Cross Country are adding USB sockets to the 170 fleet.

That is good news, I hope though that they will be available though the entire train and not just in First Class.
 

Aictos

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Seems that someone at XC is rather red faced about that as can be seen from this tweet, OOPS!!!!

No usb xc sockets.png
 

i4n

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I think more often than not people working on trains are working either because they’re being paid or are doing it because it helps them. If they’re on a commute and are being forced to do extra work at these times by employers then this needs to be addressed.

I often work on my commute by catching up on emails and preparing my day on the way in, I do this because it helps me and I'm able to add it as time on my work day (and with an hour each way on the train it makes my life so much easier). It's not expected though and if I've had a poor night or a stressful day a power nap is normally my priority!
 

Monarch010

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My employer, one of the largest in the country, expressively forbids me to work on company business outside the office or my home, for security reasons.
Whilst waiting to meet someone at Gatwick arrivals recently I stood behind a lady sitting and working on her laptop. She was browsing and occasionally updating files on a Metropolitan Police application, easily visible to me.
 

jon0844

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It's amazing what you hear being discussed over the phone on public transport too.
 

i4n

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My employer, one of the largest in the country, expressively forbids me to work on company business outside the office or my home, for security reasons.
Whilst waiting to meet someone at Gatwick arrivals recently I stood behind a lady sitting and working on her laptop. She was browsing and occasionally updating files on a Metropolitan Police application, easily visible to me.

Exactly the reason why I have a privacy filter on my screen and I don't do anything particularly sensitive but I like to keep the nosey parkers at bay... my favourite is when I'm typing away and you can see the person next to you trying to see what you're doing, one man asked me why I was typing in a laptop that was turned off a few months ago until I turned it towards him and he saw I was writing my shopping list!
 

A Challenge

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Exactly the reason why I have a privacy filter on my screen and I don't do anything particularly sensitive but I like to keep the nosey parkers at bay... my favourite is when I'm typing away and you can see the person next to you trying to see what you're doing, one man asked me why I was typing in a laptop that was turned off a few months ago until I turned it towards him and he saw I was writing my shopping list!
Did you hastily change screen? :lol:

I find when I'm in London on the Underground (Virgin Media) I can't sign in as although I use one of the networks, the account isn't in my name!
 

Ethano92

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Not really related to the posts above but I'm on an SWR 455 using it's WiFi to post this. It's working seamlessly. Perhaps by not putting up "free WiFi" posters by every doorway less people know it's there and so it works better. The train is also running seamlessly without a proper guard. They also managed to give us 10 cars on a busy service. Good day for SWR and it's wifi
 

Parallel

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Is it just me or has the wifi on the GWR Turbos really unreliable for the past few months? I seem to be able to connect less than 50% of the time when using Turbos (that's after clearing my cache) - The wifi either cannot be found, says 'no internet connection' when trying to connect, or gets stuck on the gwr.passenger.wifi page when you complete the form. It definitely hasn't worked on 166205 for some time as I can never connect to it on that unit (unit listed at the bottom of the wifi page) - The 158s and 150s have been a lot more reliable.
 

Aictos

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Not really related to the posts above but I'm on an SWR 455 using it's WiFi to post this. It's working seamlessly. Perhaps by not putting up "free WiFi" posters by every doorway less people know it's there and so it works better. The train is also running seamlessly without a proper guard. They also managed to give us 10 cars on a busy service. Good day for SWR and it's wifi

To highlight a issue with your post about the service running without a proper guard there is no such thing for three reasons:

1. No SWR service operates in Driver Only Operation in passenger service.

2. All services have guards although some see just non commercial guards, some see just commercial guards while some see a mix of the two.

3. There are no plans as I understand it to bring in DOO on the South Western.
 

KingJ

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Is it just me or has the wifi on the GWR Turbos really unreliable for the past few months? I seem to be able to connect less than 50% of the time when using Turbos (that's after clearing my cache) - The wifi either cannot be found, says 'no internet connection' when trying to connect, or gets stuck on the gwr.passenger.wifi page when you complete the form. It definitely hasn't worked on 166205 for some time as I can never connect to it on that unit (unit listed at the bottom of the wifi page) - The 158s and 150s have been a lot more reliable.

If there's a persistent issue on a particular unit, definitely report it. In theory, it is all monitored remotely but that doesn't always catch everything. The TOC themselves have little to no technical/troubleshooting access to the equipment, so you'll need to contact the operator - most of them have a dedicated support email per TOC. GWR use different providers on different stock so you'll need to contact the appropriate one;

Icomera (gwr.on.icomera.com): [email protected]
PassengerWiFi (gwr.passengerwifi.com): [email protected]

Just drop them an email saying what unit you're on and what the problem is. Most other TOCs will also have the support details on their sites. It's the sort of thing where if no one reports it, they're not aware there's a problem. There's a few I reported during the early days of Southeastern's deployment that got fixed as a result.
 

Aictos

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If there's a persistent issue on a particular unit, definitely report it. In theory, it is all monitored remotely but that doesn't always catch everything. The TOC themselves have little to no technical/troubleshooting access to the equipment, so you'll need to contact the operator - most of them have a dedicated support email per TOC. GWR use different providers on different stock so you'll need to contact the appropriate one;

Icomera (gwr.on.icomera.com): [email protected]
PassengerWiFi (gwr.passengerwifi.com): [email protected]

Just drop them an email saying what unit you're on and what the problem is. Most other TOCs will also have the support details on their sites. It's the sort of thing where if no one reports it, they're not aware there's a problem. There's a few I reported during the early days of Southeastern's deployment that got fixed as a result.

I agree if you don't report a issue it won't get fixed because engineers might not be aware of the issue.

So always report faults.
 

Max

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The trouble is LNER WiFi is worth about the same as they charge.

I would have completely agreed with you if you'd asked me last week, but I've made three journeys with LNER this week and have been surprised at just how impressive the WiFi has been. Pretty fast and very reliable coverage for the vast majority of my journeys. Not sure if they have done some work on the system recently but the improvement hasn't gone unnoticed.
 

Skie

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I find when I'm in London on the Underground (Virgin Media) I can't sign in as although I use one of the networks, the account isn't in my name!

If you are on a phone, they have an app that can install a certificate. Just needs the account person to sign in once, then you can get the app to put the certificate on your phone so it will always connect without demanding any actions on your part. BT also have something similar for their wifi.
 

cb00

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If there's a persistent issue on a particular unit, definitely report it. In theory, it is all monitored remotely but that doesn't always catch everything. The TOC themselves have little to no technical/troubleshooting access to the equipment, so you'll need to contact the operator - most of them have a dedicated support email per TOC. GWR use different providers on different stock so you'll need to contact the appropriate one;

Icomera (gwr.on.icomera.com): [email protected]
PassengerWiFi (gwr.passengerwifi.com): [email protected]

Just drop them an email saying what unit you're on and what the problem is. Most other TOCs will also have the support details on their sites. It's the sort of thing where if no one reports it, they're not aware there's a problem. There's a few I reported during the early days of Southeastern's deployment that got fixed as a result.

I've found Nomad to be pretty useless - when calling them, they'll generally blame the user's equipment and when emailing, maybe you'll get a response after the journey has ended to ask whether you can restart your device and try again. GWR need to get a grip of the way Nomad deals with these queries.

Only once have I had a technician actually bother to check the connectivity to find there was a fault that would be dealt with at the depot.
 

jon0844

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Southern never expanded its Wi-Fi offering with Nomad Digital, and now uses Icomera on all trains (across the GTR franchise/contract) so I expect they weren't that helpful for operators either.

I don't know how all the systems work on Icomera's setup but believe it does lots of self-diagnostic work to fix issues without any intervention. And for when a fault can't be rectified without a 'switch off and on' or replacing a bit of hardware/cabling etc, you'd think there would be a system that highlights a fault through the loss of regular communication. If that connection is lost, you know there's a problem.

In theory, there should never be a need to contact the train operator as they'd already know because their system told them.
 
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I note that if timings went to plan, Virgin should roll out Free-WiFi on all Pendolino’s from some point next month, as stated in February 2018’s Direct Award announcement.

No idea however if that plan is going to be stuck to and I would hope that is reaffirmed with the Franchise being extended again in March 2020.
 

Ih8earlies

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Does anyone in the know have any idea about potential upgrades to the various onoard wifi systems and TOC preparedness for such upgrades when 5G connectivity starts rolling out in 2019?
Are there any plans?
How easy would it be to upgrade say for example the TPE wifi system to a 5G sim/connection?
 

jon0844

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Does anyone in the know have any idea about potential upgrades to the various onoard wifi systems and TOC preparedness for such upgrades when 5G connectivity starts rolling out in 2019?
Are there any plans?
How easy would it be to upgrade say for example the TPE wifi system to a 5G sim/connection?

I'm not sure 5G is really that important for railway use. You need more low frequency spectrum for better rural coverage, rather than high frequency spectrum that relies on many more sites. 4G is fine for that.

That's not to say you can't perhaps use OHLE stanchions for a series of small cells in a mesh network, but that's likely a long long way off.

What Icomera does need to keep up to date with is modern 4G modems, allowing more efficient encoding and multiple carriers. Then you can get more out of the existing network.
 

bramling

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It's amazing what you hear being discussed over the phone on public transport too.

Indeed. I remember going home on an early-afternoon 365 out of KX a few years ago. From two rows back myself and everyone else were loudly treated to half an hour hearing all about the finer details of a close colleague’s ongoing grievance, and the finer details of a D&A case which at the time was the subject of strike action. Very unprofessional - especially as both of the people giving everyone this performance weren’t supposed to be finished until 1700!
 

Elecman

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The railway GSM network was AIUI barred from providing public connections, it was to do with planning consents. The GSM coverage for signalling purposes was considered permitted development.

Doesn’t it also operate on a different frequency band?
 

swt_passenger

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Doesn’t it also operate on a different frequency band?
Not sure at all. IIRC the original concern was more about public telecoms operators piggybacking their own GSM aerials to the same masts as NR, as a shortcut to getting planning approval for their own masts.
 

jon0844

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Doesn’t it also operate on a different frequency band?

900MHz, but separated from standard GSM (a lot of said public spectrum eventually being refarmed for 4G).

GSM-R could potentially be upgraded to LTE-R or a 5G based setup, but this is the railway so don't expect it until consumers are on 8G.. :D
 

leytongabriel

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Anybody know why the WiFi on Eurostar is so feeble? Both very slow and fading in and out, both sides of the channel. Have given up trying to use it.
 

Aictos

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I'm not sure 5G is really that important for railway use. You need more low frequency spectrum for better rural coverage, rather than high frequency spectrum that relies on many more sites. 4G is fine for that.

I agree and disagree to a point so let me explain...

Yes I agree that 5G isn't really that important for transportation purposes however it's use might free up more 4G for the rest of us to use.

That said, 5G will no doubt be only compatible with the latest handset costing a small fortune as I can't see them having backwards compatibility with existing 4G handsets.

I certainly agree on what you say about better rural coverage however you get companies such as EE who restrict the 800Mhz frequency to these who are on Contracts with them so these who use them as a PAYG user get shafted, if a frequency is offered by a provider then it ought to be provided to all customers.

I know there's a lot of talk about 5G by the networks at the moment but until they get to 95% or above geographical coverage I would prefer they continue to improve their existing 4G networks unless of course there's a way for 5G introduction to mean better 4G geographical coverage for all.

And yes I know this is something that EE is working on but it's something that ALL operators ought to aspire to.

As to Cross Country, I have the joy of using them twice this week so will see what the wifi is like now it's free to all - I just wonder who do they use in the background to provide the coverage?
 
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