UK government threatens to turn off on-train wifi
No trains, late trains and cancelled trains. The British commuter is prepared to put up with a lot. Then the government said we’ll cancel your wifi. That has proved to be a signal passed at danger for the travelling public. A radical cost cutting programme has hinted that trains in England could lose wifi provision because the Department for Transport says wifi is a low-priority for passengers, and it wants to deliver the best possible value for money on the tracks. That may be a huge misjudgement, and the ministers in Westminster may be forced to make that most awkward of manoeuvres – a railway u-turn.
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The alternative is of course online access via the smartphones directly. To improve that, train operators would have to install microwave-transparent windows. But even then, passengers would still be able to access only closer masts than with antennas of a centralized wifi-linked antenna on the train’s roof. That would mean less bandwidth (shared by all passengers) und more masts.
So that would end up with a worse service at higher costs to society and probably also to users.