O Canada! > Canadian > Canadian Broadband > VIA Rail improves on board Wi-Fi

VIA Rail improves on board Wi-Fi

Videotron?

reply to jfmezei
If they lose signal with one provider and change to another, does that mean all of the passengers get disconnected momentarily?

They say: "The World's Fastest Wifi on Rails" and then they reiterate that statement... for such a bold claim, they have no data whatsoever to back it up

If the train is travelling in Canada it's likely the world's slowest wi-fi.

reply to jfmezei
When I was on a train from Windsor to London a few weeks ago, I couldn't even get a IP from their wi-fi. What's the good of having improved wi-fi if you can't connect to it?

reply to Oinktastic
Yeah let's hope there's a fault tolerance link i.e. satellite uplink as a backup. With the speed of a moving train and the short distance of towers, I would be very surprised if there weren't frequent drop outs.

The antenna system they described is an interesting idea but no doubt there will be dead zones unless they've actually built more towers along the tracks.

reply to jfmezei
I have been using the wifi on the via windsor/toronto daily commute from Brantford to TO and back link for quite a while and it is quite terrible. Many failed attempts to log on, slow, dropped connections. But they have done a decent job of trying to make it accessible to everyone by blocking things like youtube so that everyone on the car gets a decent connection - that is when you can get it :-p

reply to jfmezei
I imagine the 3 are probably going to include Bell/Rogers. Not sure if they would bother with Telus since they have very little native coverage and ride on Bell's network. 3rd could be a sat. link OR Videotron perhaps.

The link is "stable" in that everything is in a tunnel. You could even bond multiple links together from disparate access providers using the tunnel. Just like MLPPP. I've kept a VPN session alive over a few hundred KM so it works well enough.

The service has limitations. No streaming or megaupload type service, they are blocked. I suspect they throttle P2P as well. This is because a whole trainload of passengers are sharing a connection. Quite reasonable I think for a free service.

reply to jfmezei
I am a frequent TO-MTL VIA traveller, and so far I mostly gave up on their wi-fi. I think until now they were relying on Bhell's wireless network.

I usually use my Fido phone to tether during travel so that I am not limited in terms of media content and such during the trip.

The reason why I think they use Bhell, is that when I am out of coverage area, their wi-fi will sometimes work and vice-versa, so clearly it wasn't the Rogers network.

From my experience, Rogers has a very decent coverage in Quebec, but it sort of sucks in Ontario. For example, when leaving the MTL station I can stream netflix for almost an hour and a half (partially thanks to buffering) before the signal becomes too weak to continue.

In the other direction, the most I can hope to get is 30 minutes. The signal becomes too weak virtually as soon as the train leaves Toronto.

For the rest of the trip, for the most part, the Rogers coverage is insufficient for extensive data usage, but it works intermittently when transferring light amounts of data.

Also a premier member and very frequent traveller in the corridor. In my experience, once you leave the core of Toronto, there are many impediments to good signals and you're at the fringe of the area they need to cover since the CN routes are very close to the lakes. Next, speed becomes an issue. At 80-100MPH, transfer rates drop dramatically and drop outs become more frequent as you tower hop. Speed drops even with clear line of sight as speed increases. The segment between Smiths Falls and Fallowfield and Ottawa-Coteau on the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal routing also has poor coverage on all carriers.

In my experience, both Bellus (EVDO or HSPA) and Rogers are about the same overall. But the peaks and valleys in speed/signal happen at different points.

In the past two years, I found service between Dorval and Ottawa to be quite acceptable.

I think that one reason is that those trains are lightly loaded compared to the montreal-toronto and ottawa-toronto. Fewer people using wi-fi per train means more bandwidth per person.

I know that commuter trains have been looking for a way to provide wi-fi on their trains, but haven't found a way. Imagine the load on a tower when you get 1000 passengers trying to access the web from the train, when a tower is designed to handle a handful of people at a time.

I suspect that the "3 networks" may have more to do with increasing capacity than having better coverage.

Note that the coteau-ottawa run does not follow any highway and yet, they did have service. I know that one incantation of the service was satellite for downlink and mobile phone for uplink, and while I was able to reliably get the CRTC music streamed via UDP on my Mac on my way to the hearings, protocols that needed TCP were not as good because of dropped packets (I assume).

reply to jfmezei
Why is it so hard for the train, when the buses seem to have excellent wi-fi? I took the Greyhound bus to New York city and there was wi-fi the whole route with practically an open laptop on every seat. I'm sure they weren't all using the network, but a lot of them were.

reply to jfmezei
I work driving and i sat by a park via train other day and was wondering how that works in a fast moving train. Thought it must connect to a satellite or something to keep the connection? I had 3 bars about 100 yards away almost, I didnt check how fast it was, but worked quick enough to check my emails and send a couple.

Since canadian trains barely exceed speeds driven by cars, the speed of the train shouldn't be too much of a factor.

reply to jfmezei
Well back in 2008 "Passengers on select high-speed TGV trains in France travelling eastbound from Paris at speeds of up to 320kmph can enjoy a fledgling wi-fi service for free - but don't expect the free connectivity lunch to last." So speed is not the problem.

High speed TGV trains get online

Ah satellite connections Wireless Internet in French TGV’s while travelling at 320 Km

Japan's bullet trains as well

Cripes I look forward to 50 mbps at home, they have it the stations.

The previous incarnation of wi-fi on VIA was from the same company that provided service on the TGVs in France.

Not sure if the current new generation is done by the same company.

Note that uplink has always been via ground mobile networks.

reply to walkerp

reply to jfmezei
Last time I took a bus that had wifi down to Boston, it spent the vast majority of the trip with no connection, and most of the time when it did have a connection, the latency was so high it was unusable.
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Developer: Tomato/MLPPP, Linux/MLPPP, etc »fixppp.org

I took the train from Toronto to Ottawa, and back again....

Wifi sucked badly - it kept dropping out constantly. Could barely chat on msn for 5 mins without dropping.