May 13th - "I'm on the train" – but is the wifi any good?
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 13 May 2024
⏱️ 6 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
South Western Railway is shortly to bring in ultra-fast wifi on trains between London and Hampshire. But almost everywhere else in the UK, connectivity on rail is lousy. Why is this, and what can be done about it?
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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 and that |
| 0:10.6 | washing noise yes I means I'm on a train again not just any old train though this is the |
| 0:16.4 | 20 billion pound crossrail train the Elizabeth line which rushes from one side of London to the other with a substantial chunk in the middle. |
| 0:29.3 | Now, I have nominally logged on to the internet. |
| 0:33.9 | It took a whole distance, about three minutes between Farringdon and Liverpool Street Station for it even to register my presence. |
| 0:42.3 | I am now trying to upload a modest file about the size of this podcast recording and it is steadfastly on zero. |
| 0:50.3 | I want to talk about why Wi-Fi on trains is important and why things are as bad as they |
| 0:58.4 | are. You might think it's a bit of a first world problem. The fact that I can't automatically get |
| 1:04.7 | absolutely high-speed gigabyte connectivity when I step aboard a train but actually if you are going to encourage |
| 1:14.8 | people to travel more by train as opposed to for instance by plane or by car then you need to make |
| 1:23.4 | it worth while and the best way to do that is very simply to make sure that they can get on |
| 1:30.0 | and work just as you can at home there's some good news there is going to be on southwestern railway |
| 1:38.2 | from london waterloo to southampton really top-class connectivity. |
| 1:51.2 | It's going to be absolutely super fast, but it's only one line, and it's not even all of that. |
| 1:57.8 | The high-quality Wi-Fi will last for about maybe half an hour from Earlsfield, |
| 2:00.9 | southwest London, to Basingstoke in Hampshire. |
| 2:07.6 | And despite promises, which I'm carbon dating back to 2015, |
| 2:15.0 | when the then-rail minister, Claire Perry, announced that there is going to be free Wi-Fi across trains and it's all going to be great. Well, it clearly isn't. Yeah, mostly it's free. |
| 2:20.5 | It's not that long ago, since you had to kind of tap in your credit card numbers and everything. |
| 2:26.8 | But now, unfortunately, it's there and it's rubbish. Let me tell you why. Well, I think we can blame the Victorians for not having |
| 2:36.9 | the foresight to imagine that a couple of hundred years after they started building the railway network, |
| 2:42.9 | they really should have some heed to us wanting to get online. They didn't do that. Railways, |
... |
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