By Natasha Lomas, 5 March 2008 11:36
NEWS
A free wi-fi service on the East Coast Main Line railway is proving extremely popular with passengers.
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Rail operator National Express has seen wi-fi usage more than triple since it introduced a free service for all passengers in December last year, when it took over the franchise.
The number of people using the wi-fi has risen from around 30,000 per month to more than 100,000 in January alone, it said. Previously wi-fi access was only complementary in First Class. Standard class travellers had to fork out ÂŁ4.95 an hour to get online.
Alan Hyde, head of communications at National Express East Coast, said in a statement: "Anecdotally, major employers along the East Coast route tell us that the addition of wi-fi is another reason for them to switch from air to rail, as it is much easier for their employees to stay in touch and keep working while on the move."
The East Coast Main Line runs from London to Scotland and carries more than 17.4 million passengers per year.
Comments
There are 6 comments. Join the discussion
1. anonymous
someone please tell southwest trains to put the same service on offer!!!
2. anonymous
This would be a success story, if they'd upgraded the system to cope with the extra users. The DHCP scope regularly runs out of free leases, and as the backhaul bandwidth is still the same it's slowed down to the point of being unusable...
3. Simon
Are they REALLY surprised ? Make it free and people use it more, who'd have thought it !
4. Allan
C2C have this on trial, just on a couple of trains across the whole fleet.
Its nice to have, but, if its targetted at business users they need to allow you to VPN. currently VPN seems to be blocked.
You cannot send them a comment form the beta page either as the redirect they force on you to log in to the service breaks the link to thier comment form - so I doubt they have much user feedack.
5. Chris Goodman
Broadband connection to the internet, be it by data cable or WiFi, has become an integral part of life in the last couple of years. It provides social, business and domestic management and communication facilities and makes life a lot simpler.
Any business or service that has customers - be it hotel, caravan park, restaurant, airport, aircraft, train - needs to prioritise the provision of WiFi service.
6. Richard
Hope it entertained the passengers trapped for 4 hours last week near here.
FOUR HOURS trapped on a broken East Coast main line train, within a few hundred yards of a station?
Perhaps no-one could access Google maps?