BT broadband office

Wifi woes

Posted 11 August 2006 at 11:11AM by Derek Hemphill in Connecting to the Internet

It wasn't so long ago that wireless internet access was only available in selected coffee shops and burger joints. Now WiFi is all around us - literally! The race is on to swamp our cities with high-speed WiFi hotspots. Wireless internet providers such as The Cloud and BT have already started installing access points around key urban areas to allow us gadget-happy consumers roam free while maintaining that essential internet connection. That's fine if you spend most of your time around city centres but what about the millions of us who spend more time between centres regularly travelling the length and breadth of the country?

I frequently travel between Glasgow and London and recently opted for the somewhat more relaxed 'Route of the flying Scotsman' (the 3pm from Kings Cross to those less familiar!). Yes the train may add an extra hour on to the journey but the one big draw for me was that I was informed GNER had introduced wi-fi on their trains.

With five and a bit hours to kill and a backlog of emails to go through, I boarded the train happy in the knowledge that I would arrive in Glasgow with an empty inbox and a sense of accomplishment. Err, not quite!

Indeed GNER do have wireless internet access on their trains at a cost of £2.95 for 30 minutes or £9.95 for 3 hours in cattle class and complimentary in first class.

According to the information leaflet, "it's easy" to set up an internet connection and once established, unlike mobile coverage on trains, the connection will remain "uninterrupted throughout your journey". This is thanks to the clever way in which the service uses a combination of mobile and satellite technology to connect to the internet - seamlessly selecting the strongest signal. GNER's website explains the technology in more detail.

Actually it was fairly easy to connect to the hotspot. I switched on my laptop, inserted the wireless card and selected 'gnerwifi' when prompted by the Windows WiFi utility panel. When I fired up Internet Explorer, it automatically redirected me to GNER's WiFi page. It was here that I was delighted to discover that they even offered a free trial of the WiFi service. Following the instructions, it was not long before I was surfing the web while hurtling north at 100mph. That's when joy turned to frustration....

It's true that your connection doesn't tend to drop out even while going through tunnels. However, when you try to call a web page with your browser its another story. It took around 15 minutes to fully load an outlook web access page for email and the another 10 minutes to open an email from the inbox. Giving up on that, I tried various other sites from BT Broadband Office, BBC and just plain old Google and all took an age to load. The only page that loaded quickly was the GNER's page with a handy little map showing your current location (this page is served from the access point on the train rather than the internet). After a couple of hours watching sites load like paint drying, I gave up and was thankful at not having paid for the experience.

GNER's WiFi service is a welcome invention in the current climate of air travel alerts. It might just be the carrot to entice many more domestic business travellers to opt for the train. The connection to the hotspot on the train works well, all they need to do now is sort out the internet connection and it'll be perfect.

Tags: gner, trains, travel, wireless

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