[Mark Caswell]

What are your experiences of wifi provision on UK rail services? I’ve rarely had a good experience, and this morning has been particularly frustrating.

I’m travelling from London to Plymouth with GWR and the connectivity is very slow – not unusable but certainly not great. A lot of fellow passengers are resorting to tethering to their phones to access data that way.

Do you find some operators / train types / routes are better than others? And how about abroad – which countries do train wifi well?

[SouthernOcean]

My recent experience is limited to services on Southern from Surrey into London. WiFi on these sevices is free and reasonably good. Not the fastest but OK for email, browsing etc.

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Mark Caswell

[Stowage222]

If you are able to connect, I find LNER WiFi to be reasonably useable.

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[DavidSmith2]

I had a similar experience with GWR in May/June – London to Penzance and return.

On both journeys I ended up using my phone as a hotspot.

Incidentally, both trains were late arriving and I received a partial (not insignificant) refund. On this issue, the system worked well and GWR contacted me to arrange the refund, rather than vice versa.

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Mark Caswell

[TominScotland]

Interesting question, Mark

The two providers that I use regularly give mixed service. Scotrail locally in the West of Scotland is generally very good for wifi but then I am normally only on the train for 15 minutes! Wifi on the West Coast line has always been patchy but I have always put that down to locational issues.

That said, I took the 13 hour night train from Stockholm to Lulea (and back), operated by VY, last month and wifi throughout was excellent in our berth. Recent experiences in Norway (VY again) and Italy (Trenitalia) were also good.

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Mark Caswell

[Tramor01]

I used to be a fairly frequent traveller on LNER Kings Cross to Leeds route, and the service used to be pretty good, even when the trains were full.
These days I use GWR fairly frequently on the Paddington to Cardiff route (usually in coach K or L) and the wi-fi is abysmal.

Don’t get me started on the quality of 1st class service between LNER and GWR, it’s chalk and cheese.

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[Johnnyg]

I use Southern from West Sussex to LGW and Victoria and generally have pretty good reception. Well enough to stream sport or videos.

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[AMcWhirter]

As a customer mainly of EMR and LNER I van confirm that the latter provides the best coverage.

EMR can be good too but the Midland Mainline does run through some areas where coverage is weak.

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Mark Caswell

[ViajeroUK]

I mostly only use local trains (West Midlands Railway) in UK, their WiFi is usually OK but journey times typically less than 30mins.

Can endorse Tom in Scotland’s comments about Trenitalia, seem to always get good WiFi, even when travelling at 300KPH, Deutsche Bahn have usually been good as well.

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Mark Caswell

[AlanOrton1]

I use SWT and GWR and the former is generally always better than the latter.
I’d say about 80-90% of the time SWT works ok, though it is not that quick and can drop out.
I’ve found GWR works about 50% of the time.
I always revert to my mobile as a hotspot – and if it’s important I’d always go for this over SWT & GWR’s free WiFi service.

Overseas I’ve alway found Amtrak to work very well. And when within the station area the NY metro also offers strong WiFi.

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Mark Caswell

[Montysaurus]

I travel on Avanti West Coast about twice a month. Their Wi-Fi is poor to non existent. I usually get a connection to the internal service but “no internet connection “. I have contacted them several times about this and other things but I never get a reply. I use LNER occasionally and their Wi-Fi is excellent. Slightly off topic, LNER on board service is vastly superior to Avanti but then even in BR days East Coast was superior to West Coast.

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Mark Caswell

[CheerUp]

Virgin // Avanti trains ok in 1st, but poor in 2nd class.
Fine on Gatwick Express.

Still nowhere near as good as European trains, having lived in the Netherlands (pre roaming), the wifi was excellent on trains.

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Mark Caswell

[FDOS]

@Mark

I agree about GWR – the wifi is very variable. I travel 1st class, so my comment is based on that experience.

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Mark Caswell

[Bath_VIP]

As a regular user of GWR services, I can confirm GWR wifi is useless. They were the last TOC to install wifi and had to be dragged kicking and screaming into installing it. They then went to lowest, crappiest bidder…

Oddly enough, the local trains have better wifi but that is because trains used to be Thames trains before being transferred to GWR about 5 years ago.

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Mark Caswell

[sparkyflier]

Agree with FDOS – GWR is highly variable. Used them last week on a long journey which was busy and the wifi was reasonable.

Used it today on a long journey but a very un-busy train and it was pretty poor. Which is very frustrating as south west England has many areas with hardly any mobile phone signal.

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Mark Caswell

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