How to sort poor passenger connectivity on trains

Amazing

This is a fantastic article John that I also liked reading, I've been also thinking about Chris Bryant's speech that I read and indeed I may be inclined to write to him. The one thing that caught me in this report was the question about how much throughput do we need to each train, which is in my language too. A report I liked on this topic was an analysis carried out by OfCom published in 2020 here, https://www.ofcom.org.uk/phones-and-broadband/coverage-and-speeds/rail-passenger-data-access/, but of course use case habits over time may change and so the results may not remain static. But technology could be developed in a way to steer those habits in other directions that may help the technology itself that would be interesting. In any case I'm also all for the big point to be made that significant long term investment is required and indeed it's something for both DSIT and DfT.

Everyone wants it, no one wants to pay for it.

Very good article by John on a topic that gets a regular airing in Linked In. However John's been very good at looking at the issues and potential solutions. The topic will always be emotive. The frustrations of sitting in a high speed metal tube with hundreds of other people trying to get some connection to pass the time. Of course the biggest problem is that you're sat on a high speed metal tube with hundreds of others trying to use the same signal as you. As John says, this can be resolved with investment, but with average revenue per user going down, would it be a good investment for a network - particularly on some quiet rail routes?

I emailed Chris Bryant the day after the session and explained the pilot work I'd been invovled in nearly 12 years ago with trackside high-bandwidth APs to on-train repeaters, how getting NR buy-in was difficult, how the Roscos don't want modifications to 'their' trains and how there was no money available from the MNOs to do this. I even mentioned GSM-R... Compare this to the current TfL roll-out of an NHN/JOTS solution and the sheer delight of being able to look up trains times when on board a train on the Piccadilly Line deep under London. The difference, as you say, is the nature of the funding; TfL see this as a necessity which has to be paid for as part of 'their' service whereas we have a myriad of actors in the non-TfL piece, none of whom want to pay for it. The other side that is worth considering is that much of the rail network passes through some very remote places and it could be used to serve those 'not-spots' with cellular service. Again, this comes down to ￡￡￡. Oh - and my email was acknowledged and passed onto 'the relevant people in DSIT.' That probably means | >> /dev/null ??