By Andy McCue, 14 August 2007 11:30
NEWS
Rail passengers on the London to Scotland east coast mainline will get free wi-fi as part of National Express' £1.4bn winning bid to run the franchise.
National Express will take over the rail route from GNER in mid-December this year after beating off competition for the franchise from Arriva, FirstGroup, Stagecoach and Virgin.
GNER completed the £3.2m installation of wi-fi broadband connectivity on all 41 of its east coast trains last year and although the service is free for first-class passengers those in standard have to pay either £2.95 per half hour or £9.95 for a full day's use.
Wireless from A to Z
Click on the links below to find out more
A is for Antivirus
B is for Bluetooth
C is for The Cloud
D is for dotMobi
E is for Email
F is for FMC
G is for GPS
H is for HSDPA
I is for i-mode
J is for Japan Air
K is for Korea
L is for LBS
M is for M2M
N is for NFC
O is for Operating systems
P is for Pubs
Q is for QoS
R is for Roaming
S is for Satellite
T is for TV
U is for UMTS
V is for Virgin
W is for WiMax
X is for XDA
Y is for Yucca
Z is for Zigbee
But in addition to faster journey times National Express has also promised to extend free wi-fi to passengers in standard class as part of its seven-year contract.
The on-board wi-fi uses a combination of a satellite link and mobile 3G/GPRS networks to maintain 100 per cent connectivity even when going through tunnels. A server from Swedish company Icomera on the train provides a 2MB satellite downlink, which is combined with the mobile connectivity.
Wireless access points are then fitted at the end of each carriage on a train, which connect to the main on-board satellite server and can support around 40 simultaneous users in each carriage at one time.
National Express said it will also build a simpler "one-stop shop" website to highlight the cheapest tickets available, introduce smartcards by 2010, provide real-time travel updates to mobile phones and allow passengers to print tickets at home or use "m-tickets" through their mobile phones.
Comments
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1. anonymous
Latency is already a problem on this service for business users trying to connect using a VPN tunnel. The concept of free wifi is excellent, although I am concerned that the technology will be put under further pressure by an increase in the number of connections. I would like to see investment in Wimax services like those being installed on west coast services.