GNER on-train wifi - an utter waste of time and money

As I’m spending 5 hours on a train to and from London today, I figured I’d use the time productively and get some work done - not least catching up on a backlog of emails. I’d thought this was going to be made easier by using the on-board wifi service on the GNER trains between York and London - something that GNER are very proud of, and made much of during their franchise renewal exercise which recently concluded.

It’s presumably all part of their efforts to capture more high-margin business travelers who are willing to pay over the odds for flexible ticketing, station parking and other gizmos, as well as being able to use the traveling time productively. The idea presumably being that if you can get online with the onboard wifi, you can be cranking out those emails.

I can report that in practice, the service is a complete waste of time and money. To start with, the connection speed makes a 9.6kb dialup connection over GSM look like 100Mbs Ethernet. There’s supposedly a satellite connection on the roof of the train, backed up with multiple parallel GSM links - I suspect that reality is more like two tin cans and a very long piece of wet string. Pinging a range of servers such as Google was regularly resulting in 80% packet loss and 9,000 millisecond ping times.

Then halfway through the hour online that I bought, the wifi signal collapsed briefly. When it came back the DHCP server was unreachable, so my Powerbook spent the rest of the journey resolutely stuck with a 169.0.0.0 address.

So, GNER, you owe me the £4.95 I paid for an hour’s (alleged) internet access. If you’re planning to work on any of their Mallard services, I’d recommend you either download everything you need well before getting on the train, or alternatively take a thick paperback book instead. I eventually posted this with the aid of a (much, much faster) GRPS connection from a mobile, while stationary in a Starbucks.

Filed under Technical stuff, Working smarter |