I'm on the train – and the wifi is superb

Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast

The Independent

Places & Travel, Leisure, Society & Culture

3.6 • 628 Ratings

🗓️ 19 November 2025

⏱️ 5 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Great Western Railway has just unveiled "Formula 1" high-speed internet connectivity on one of its intercity express trains, connecting London Paddington with the West of England and South Wales. It uses technology from the world of motorsport to harness satellite and phone mast signals to maximum effect.

I have been on a train from Paddington to Newbury in Berkshire and back, sounding out the views of Nick Fry from Motion Applied, Andy Jasper of the Eden Project and GWR managing director Mark Hopwood.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Wednesday the 19th of November and I'm on the train once again, but once.
0:10.8	This is a train with the best Wi-Fi in Britain. That's the promise from Great Western Railway and also from a company Horton Motion Applied, which is applying
0:23.4	techniques from Formula One to provide the best possible signal for users of this particular
0:31.8	train which is on a kind of pilot scheme which is using the data from normal masts as well as Starlink satellites.
0:41.5	The idea is that you will be able to work, rest and watch Star Wars quite happily without
0:48.1	having to worry about the Wi-Fi being lousy. I've been using the internet since the 1990s and the usual
0:59.2	train experience that I'm having is pretty much the same as it was when you had dial-up connections.
1:05.8	Very unreliable, very slow. Sounds like me, frankly. Nick Frye, the chairman of Motion Applied, has been telling me more.
1:13.9	What we're doing is taking Formula One technology and applying it to Wi-Fi on trains.
1:20.0	So this train has significantly better Wi-Fi coverage than any other train in the country.
1:26.1	But how does Formula One and the 833 from Newbury to
1:32.1	London Paddington, what have they got in common? Well, there's some fairly formidable challenges with
1:37.0	both, but the Formula One car is going around the circuit at very high speed. On Sundays at a
1:42.2	Grand Prix, there's several hundred thousand spectators and
1:45.2	media and cameras. So the air is full of things going on in the airwaves, which means
1:49.9	communication is quite difficult. Trains actually are somewhat similar. They move very fast. They're
1:55.6	going through cuttings. There's lots of people on board underneath trees. So traditionally, as we all know,
2:01.6	unfortunately, Wi-Fi on trains hasn't worked very well, and that's the problem we set out to address.
2:06.6	It's fundamentally different from how a Wi-Fi system on a train normally works.
2:11.6	So on this train, there are four pizza-sized boxes on the roof of the train. They've got antennas in each.
2:18.2	They've got a computer.
2:19.6	And what it does is try and work out where the best signal is.
	...

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