Reliable internet for trains

[S-Bahn]

As I understand it, trains that offer WiFi access the 4G mobile network and use a wifi router in the carriage that users log into. This obviously means they are reliant on the mobile phone providers general network and signal strength.

Have any experiments been done with installing internet access points along the railway line itself, (e.g. welding an access point to the trusses of the OH wires), so that the train auto connects to the mast as it is passing along the line and the passengers log on to the carriage WiFi as normal.

Just wondering if there have been any trials with getting signal to the trains using the railway infrastructure itself?

 

[Poiskey]

It's not specifically aimed at access on trains (cars instead), but look up V2X and 802.11p. Those are the technical standards for WiFi intended for smart roads, but it should be simple enough to adapt for trains as it is the same principle.

In answer to your question though, I'm not sure this has ever been tried on a railway specifically.

*V2X - vehicle-to-everything
*802.11p - an amendment to the global WiFi standards governing how systems must operate in the specific use case of high speed vehicles communicating between each other, and the roads they are travelling on.

Edited to explain acronyms

 

[mavsk]

Most installs will use more than one 4G SIM (4 is typical) across more than one network to try and get round areas of poor reception.

 

[Skie]

Merseyrails new units will have a network of track-side transmitters across the entire network (including in the 6.5 miles of tunnel) to keep the trains connected with a high bandwidth link, think it's the first place in the UK to do it.

https://twitter.com/radwin/status/1167000730101850112
https://www.radwin.com/transportation/

 

[jon0844]

Southern and, I think Virgin?, had a system that used Wi-Max. It limited the coverage area (Victoria to Brighton and little else for Southern) and also used W-CDMA I think for elsewhere.

The current systems make do with 4G and multiple operator SIMs (I'd argue you only need EE and Vodafone to get the best combination) and seem to work pretty well on many routes where coverage has been enhanced.

Vodafone states it has continuous, high-capacity, 4G coverage from Victoria to Gatwick (including Victoria station itself and perhaps others) and I'd say this appears true in my experience.

 

[Llanigraham]

Southern and, I think Virgin?, had a system that used Wi-Max. It limited the coverage area (Victoria to Brighton and little else for Southern) and also used W-CDMA I think for elsewhere.

The current systems make do with 4G and multiple operator SIMs (I'd argue you only need EE and Vodafone to get the best combination) and seem to work pretty well on many routes where coverage has been enhanced.

Vodafone states it has continuous, high-capacity, 4G coverage from Victoria to Gatwick (including Victoria station itself and perhaps others) and I'd say this appears true in my experience.

Really?
On my regular trips to London from here I get far better service on the TfW trains to New St than I do on the West Coast trains from there onwards.

 

[Nym]

There is such a system, it's called GSM-R.

 

[jon0844]

There is such a system, it's called GSM-R.

That is NOT a reliable means of providing Internet to trains. GSM offers very poor data speeds even in EDGE form, which is an overlay on standard 2G anyway.

LTE-R might be, and there will no doubt be a 5G version in the future, but it isn't available for public use anyway.

 

[johntea]

The problem is the web filtering on train WiFi leaves a lot to be desired, you can't stream media etc...this is the year 2019 not 1999!

Pretty much every train WiFi I've tried I've got sick of within 5 minutes and back to my 4G mobile data it is!

 

[hooverboy]

That is NOT a reliable means of providing Internet to trains. GSM offers very poor data speeds even in EDGE form, which is an overlay on standard 2G anyway.

LTE-R might be, and there will no doubt be a 5G version in the future, but it isn't available for public use anyway.

LTE-R is already working and available.deployed in china and south korea( LG and nokia siemens networks gear used in the latter)

it is possible to have a dual band version, with 700/800/900MHz bands for secure/rail comms and 2.45 Ghz bands for passenger data.
it still won't be quite as good quality for the passenger (2.45 ghz band) as a standard telecom network though as most of that now is running in 3.4,3,8, snd soon to be sub 6Ghz spectra.

digital TV is in the process of moving out of the 700MHz band as we speak.There have recently been some changovers in sweden and germany, and the UK is also making the switch.

for rail use, the 700-900mhz band is ideal really.It's not being that widely used by joe public any more.It would be easy enough to allocate this purely for secure comms in the future, and has the benefit of being longer range and dealing with hills and other obstacles better.

 

[pdq]

Pretty much every train WiFi I've tried I've got sick of within 5 minutes and back to my 4G mobile data it is!

Agreed. Until wifi on trains offers the same standard of connectivity that I get at home, I don't see the point. Most users who care about being online are going to be on a decent data plan on their device, which will nearly always be quicker than the on-board connection, doesn't require a login every time, and doesn't block sites it thinks are unsuitable (like this site on TPE!).

 

[AM9]

The problem is the web filtering on train WiFi leaves a lot to be desired, you can't stream media etc...this is the year 2019 not 1999!

Pretty much every train WiFi I've tried I've got sick of within 5 minutes and back to my 4G mobile data it is!

The emphasis (rightly so) is to provide a reasonable service to the many. Providing sufficient bandwidth for everybody to stream would be prohibitively expensive. So the solution is to base individual bandwidth allocation on the needs of the many. The whims of the few can easily be met with contracts including 4g data.

 

[jon0844]

LTE-R is already working and available.deployed in china and south korea( LG and nokia siemens networks gear used in the latter)

it is possible to have a dual band version, with 700/800/900MHz bands for secure/rail comms and 2.45 Ghz bands for passenger data.
it still won't be quite as good quality for the passenger (2.45 ghz band) as a standard telecom network though as most of that now is running in 3.4,3,8, snd soon to be sub 6Ghz spectra.

digital TV is in the process of moving out of the 700MHz band as we speak.There have recently been some changovers in sweden and germany, and the UK is also making the switch.

for rail use, the 700-900mhz band is ideal really.It's not being that widely used by joe public any more.It would be easy enough to allocate this purely for secure comms in the future, and has the benefit of being longer range and dealing with hills and other obstacles better.

700MHz will be great for coverage, but any such railway service is not going to have the necessary site density to offer a sufficiently fast data service.

 

[hooverboy]

700MHz will be great for coverage, but any such railway service is not going to have the necessary site density to offer a sufficiently fast data service.

you'd be surprised.

for rail/secure comm use 700Mhz is perfect.
repeaters can easily be strapped to signal masts/OHLE Piles and with some nifty antennas give "line of sight" power levels of much greater ampltude than an antenna that belts out signal over 360 degrees.

the other bonus to LTE-R is the way it's modulated, the information is broadcast to a series of nodes,and then reformed that the other end,and you can get a lot of signals to overlap on the same carrier this way without interfering with one another(for those in the know the technology is OFDM-orthogonal frequency division multiplexing)

with GSM you can get far less, and the modulation is supplied by an underlying series of digital pulses,telling only only a couple of nodes to power off/on in time with the pulse/configuration of binary code- known as shift keys.

 

[jon0844]

The point of using a low frequency carrier is to offer wider coverage, or improve indoor coverage, which is great and what all operators do with 4G now (band 20, 800MHz).

But you can't offer high speed over a large area. Hence why you usually aggregate with other bands. Or you need a high density of sites, which then means you could probably benefit from higher frequencies.

Plus how much bandwidth is there at 700MHz? It's more than just the encoding of data. 5MHz, 10, 15?

 

[ole17]

Train wifi should be more of a reliable internet alternative to 4G rather than high-speed as of now, especially to the travelling office workers on their Outlook.

Also its easy to bypass filtering by installing apps that directs your device to use a specific 3rd-party DNS server eg. cloudflare 1.1.1.1, and securely connect to them via https as a bonus at the same time, so no one else can see your internet browsing history.

 

[bunnahabhain]

I've never bothered with onboard wifi, my data package is large enough that I need never worry about it running out. That is the actual solution, pay for what you want instead of expecting it for free in your train fare. SBB in Switzerland have the same view as my own, they have installed signal boosters onboard their trains to ensure a good mobile phone reception for everybody to use their own data.

 

[Dave_Cardboard]

Wi-Fi in the saloons is relatively easy - just nail a few Access Points to the ceiling (incidentally, Wi-Fi is facilitated by "Access Points" not "Routers" - this isn't just hair splitting over nomenclature, in the field of data networking an "AP" and a "Router" are very different things - the "get-you-on-the-Internet-omni-box" you have at home contains both and a lot of other stuff besides.) 2-3 AP's per carriage would be my preference, depending on predicted pax. numbers and how good a service one wishes to avail to each Wi-Fi device. These would then all be lashed into a grand "on train" (wired) network and delivered to "something else" to upink to the rest of the world.

As others have indicated, the "hard" part is the uplink from the train to the rest of the world, especially since trains move - some of them very fast. Even with well known paths ('cos trains run on tracks) and clever antenna design and positioning, I'm skeptical that existing 802.11 (Wi-Fi) standard could provide the bandwidth and reliability to service a train load of pax. all wanting to watch Eastenders on their phone. With Wi-Fi's relatively low xmit power, a fast moving train would not stay "in range" for long before needing to "hand off" (roam) to the next base station.

And of course, all the Wi-Fi device inside the saloons and near by lineside premises with their own Wi-Fi, mutually interfere with each other and any lineside Wi-Fi devices facilitating track-train comms. (I've been know to run a "sniff" for Wi-Fi AP's on my West London to Central London commute and can find literally hundreds of AP's fighting for/over/polluting the airwaves over a mere 15 mile route.)

One could easily believe that no-one has trailed this as - even as a thought experiment - one can foresee so many problems using Wi-Fi for high bandwidth and reliable train-tracks comms.

With limited bandwidth available ad potentially large numbers of pax. to service, it would not suprise me if TOps curtail or inhibit streaming video and music. I tend to think "something else" would be used for the uplinks such as 3/4/5G others have discussed.

Interestingly, London Underground are using Wi-Fi for some of their modern signalling - IIRC the Jubilee line has "wiggly wires" down the tracks and the sub-surface lines are rolling out loads of Yagi antenna and so forth.

 

[Skie]

I've never bothered with onboard wifi, my data package is large enough that I need never worry about it running out. That is the actual solution, pay for what you want instead of expecting it for free in your train fare. SBB in Switzerland have the same view as my own, they have installed signal boosters onboard their trains to ensure a good mobile phone reception for everybody to use their own data.

Doubt your phone works underground or in longer tunnels!

I've been on Pendolinos often enough to appreciate just having a wifi connection can vastly help increase your battery life. Cell data only and the phones losing about 40% even without using it, but connect it to the free wifi and the phones battery usage is vastly reduced as it can stop screaming out for rapidly changing towers and instead do it's communication over wifi (assuming your device and mobile network support wifi calling).

 

[AM9]

Doubt your phone works underground or in longer tunnels!

I've been on Pendolinos often enough to appreciate just having a wifi connection can vastly help increase your battery life. Cell data only and the phones losing about 40% even without using it, but connect it to the free wifi and the phones battery usage is vastly reduced as it can stop screaming out for rapidly changing towers and instead do it's communication over wifi (assuming your device and mobile network support wifi calling).

The battery use would be the same whether the wi-fi was free or paid for so maybe that would be the best solution. Those that want fast data access on the move should pay for it, not expect it to be loaded onto everybody's ticket prices.

 

[jon0844]

Modern handsets have chipsets that don't massively drain the battery using mobile data. I can use my P30 Pro as a hotspot sharing carrier-aggregated 4G data over a 5GHz Wi-Fi connection and use it for hours with 10-20% battery drop at most. 5G shouldn't be much worse as it's not that different to 4G.

For tunnels, just look at the Channel Tunnel. I can get speeds of up to 100Mbps on 4G going to/from France, so I'd suggest that improving phone coverage is the way forward (oh and there's the tunnel to Heathow that's covered by leaky feeders too). I believe it will come on the underground, which will be a gamechanger (even if other countries have offered this for some time).

Potentially hundreds of users accessing the network directly, rather than one box with 3 or 4 SIMs accessing the network and sharing its share through lots of access points with the issues of congestion and blackspots (the signal will vary within each coach, unless you used far more APs than I'd expect anyone would use). Newer Wi-Fi standards can address some of these issues and maintain the high speeds people might want, but it seems a lot of faff when I could one day expect to get 1 or 2Gbps on a 5G handset all for myself!!

 

[Skie]

Modern handsets have chipsets that don't massively drain the battery using mobile data. I can use my P30 Pro as a hotspot sharing carrier-aggregated 4G data over a 5GHz Wi-Fi connection and use it for hours with 10-20% battery drop at most. 5G shouldn't be much worse as it's not that different to 4G.

Problem is with a poor signal thanks to the train being a Faraday cage, rural areas having fewer masts and high speeds causing you to pass masts very quickly, your phone still has to do a lot of the background handshake and handoff at quite a high transmission power as you move from mast to mast. That absolutely drains the battery quicker.

Pendolinos/390's are notorious for it, other stock is often much better at allowing signals in, or could run on lines with better coverage.

But back to the topic of the thread, to get more reliable interwebs on a train you need to fix the lineside infrastructure. Be that more cell towers or a dedicated uplink to the trains. The 777's will have the latter, so it will be interesting to see how well it works.

 

[thenorthern]

Given the proliferation of 4G internet I can't see paid for WiFi having much of a future on trains.

With the GSM-R is it possible to incorporate some sort of 4G equipment into the transmitters given that they have the best coverage of the railway network.

 

[WatcherZero]

Merseyrails new units will have a network of track-side transmitters across the entire network (including in the 6.5 miles of tunnel) to keep the trains connected with a high bandwidth link, think it's the first place in the UK to do it.

https://twitter.com/radwin/status/1167000730101850112
https://www.radwin.com/transportation/

Metrolink has had trackside Wi-Fi to provide onboard service for several years. They laid fibreoptic cable along the whole network and periodic routers provide the onboard service as well as signal/communications for the vehicles. Station equipment such as PIDS, announcements, SOS telephones, ticket machines and CCTV use the same fibreoptic backbone, previously they used the public phone network.

 

[Skie]

Metrolink has had trackside Wi-Fi to provide onboard service for several years. They laid fibreoptic cable along the whole network and periodic routers provide the onboard service as well as signal/communications for the vehicles. Station equipment such as PIDS, announcements, SOS telephones, ticket machines and CCTV use the same fibreoptic backbone, previously they used the public phone network.

Interesting! After a bit of reading, it's similar, but also a bit different. Though Metrolink doesn't have a trackside Wi-Fi network; it uses a mesh radio network and on board Wi-Fi Access Points. A mesh network is essentially a relay, so there will be a physical network connection somewhere and then a series of powered mesh radios that relay the signal. Perfect for that sort of system where power is easily obtained but network connectivity is not, but not going to deliver great bandwidth. Merseyrail will be using microwave links (and onboard AP's), positioned where line of sight dictates which can operate over much larger distances (5km) and support the higher speeds and user volumes of a heavy rail system.

The metrolink fibre network is 1Gbps on each line (or overall, nothing is quite clear on that), whilst each Merseyrail train will have a capacity up to 750Mbps. Will be interesting to see some speed tests

 

[takno]

Not sure whether it was a case of everybody else being restricted or low demand or something, but I was able to simultaneously stream Netflix and download the next episode for later in DB first class yesterday. Definitely a world away from the worse-than-useless WiFi I've got used to in the UK

 

[AM9]

Problem is with a poor signal thanks to the train being a Faraday cage, rural areas having fewer masts and high speeds causing you to pass masts very quickly, your phone still has to do a lot of the background handshake and handoff at quite a high transmission power as you move from mast to mast. That absolutely drains the battery quicker.

Pendolinos/390's are notorious for it, other stock is often much better at allowing signals in, or could run on lines with better coverage.

But back to the topic of the thread, to get more reliable interwebs on a train you need to fix the lineside infrastructure. Be that more cell towers or a dedicated uplink to the trains. The 777's will have the latter, so it will be interesting to see how well it works.

Relay of 4/5G networks into train is probably the way to go. It's up to the providers to ensure that the signal outside the train is satisfactory. If you are travelling fast, that's not the fault of the providers, (nor the railway). If you actually need the continuous handoff then the simplest remedy is a portable charger (battery). Costs a few pounds and gives you complete control.
The railway is not responsible for providing the feed to the route of the railway, that's the provider's obligation, (they are very keen to claim 95% coverage when advertising. Maybe they will have to be honest about coverage of key transport corridors if they want the business form those who use their phones when travelling.

 

[Nick Ashwell]

Lineside 5G transmitters will be the way to go, considering the standards are developed for a lot more transmitters than 4G, in fact it's more of a capacity upgrade rather than data speeds. With dedicated 5G transmitters lineside each train could easily get a gigabit per second link.

 

[tsr]

Southern and, I think Virgin?, had a system that used Wi-Max. It limited the coverage area (Victoria to Brighton and little else for Southern) and also used W-CDMA I think for elsewhere.

The current systems make do with 4G and multiple operator SIMs (I'd argue you only need EE and Vodafone to get the best combination) and seem to work pretty well on many routes where coverage has been enhanced.

Vodafone states it has continuous, high-capacity, 4G coverage from Victoria to Gatwick (including Victoria station itself and perhaps others) and I'd say this appears true in my experience.

Southern (pre-GTR!) did indeed have WiFi on some routes, but I understand that in those days it was very hard to maintain. It must have been switched off by around 2011 ish, I think. You used to get the odd random unit up until about 2013 where the access points could still be found. It was somewhat ahead of its time in railway terms and those who discovered it were quite pleased (I don't recall it was widely advertised).

The current GTR onboard WiFi systems are not well-liked by passengers, but they are at least more prevalent. The trouble is that they are let down by the geography. People don't expect poor phone signal in the south of England, but it is virtually impossible to provide complete high-speed coverage based on mobile networks - for example, around the Downs, certain parts of the Weald, the TL Core, London Victoria (under the big shopping mall "raft") and so on.

Agreed. Until wifi on trains offers the same standard of connectivity that I get at home, I don't see the point. Most users who care about being online are going to be on a decent data plan on their device, which will nearly always be quicker than the on-board connection, doesn't require a login every time, and doesn't block sites it thinks are unsuitable (like this site on TPE!).

Quite so. Rarely is onboard wifi quicker than use of mobile data, especially if you have multiple devices on different networks so you can tether to the most appropriate one. It's also sometimes less expensive to get an add-on to your mobile data allowance than to use WiFi on the train.

 

[thenorthern]

Back in 2004 I remember the mobile phone coverage coming to the Tyne and Wear Metro and at the time I thought it would only be a matter of time before a similar thing happened to the London Underground however 15 years later the London Underground is nowhere near that level.

I suppose one problem is what is more important WiFi or ability to make telephone calls as the wifi is useful as if its free it doesn't come out of one's mobile data but at the same time its useful being able to make calls.