[TimFitzgeraldTC]

Southern/Thameslink/GEX – pretty decent and usually fine for emails and most things I need to do

EMR – poor. Unless passing through a station and stopping for a few minutes it’s blackout for me (and same if I try to tether to my mobile).

Avanti – usually ok but a few blackspots

LNER/GWR – not used in recent times. Defer to posters above with more recent experiences.

It is frustrating when it doesn’t work well whether on rail Wi-fi or trying to tether. I guess the nature of the world we live in now.

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Mark Caswell

[Graham]

LNER East Coast wifi is good, and in 1st class comes free as part of a package that also includes decent dining options, drinks etc. LNER the best service I’ve experienced.

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Mark Caswell

[scott1nthesky]

My frequent experiences in the UK are limited to GWR, LNER, TPEx, Scotrail, and Northern. By far the most reliable has been Northern – the only operator out of the 5 whose WiFi was stable enough to carry out Teams meetings whilst travelling. LNERs has been the worst and I don’t usually try to use it – their firewall blocks my VPN so I can’t do anything securely. The remaining 3 were patchy but good enough for the basics. Outside the UK I’m limited to Amtrak – they’ve been at the extremes of the UK experiences, either unusable or blazingly fast.

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Mark Caswell

[SouthernOcean]

Which is very frustrating as south west England has many areas with hardly any mobile phone signal.

This is the heart of the problem, on-board Wifi relys on mobile network signals picked up by antennae on the train. If the route passes through an area with a poor signal, then the on-board Wifi will be poor.

There is good article in the Guardian which explains this: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/may/22/how-does-train-wifi-work-and-why-is-it-under-threat-in-england. This article also throws doubt on the future of on-board Wifi.

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Mark Caswell

[Mark Caswell]

This doesn’t relate to wifi, but it does concern the outbound part of the GWR journey I commented on earlier, so I thought I would post here.

Our journey between Cornwall and London was disrupted for a couple of reasons – firstly our connecting train to Plymouth was cancelled, so we ended up getting a bus across the bridge – and then the train between Plymouth and London was delayed due to an issue with one of the diesel engines meaning the train had to limit its speed.

I filled in the delay repay form online, and to GWR’s credit in less than 12 hours my claim was approved, for the full value of the outbound journey.

[Hannah Brandler]

I had a return London-Paris trip on the Eurostar this week and found the wifi to be better than on previous journeys but still patchy.

At times, it was quite slow to load pages (I eventually gave up when trying to load this forum post) and the connection drops out at various stages of the journey.

I tend to save the work I can do offline for train journeys, or reading files that I’ve downloaded ahead of time. It’s always a risk when uploading something online during a train journey, as the connection might drop out and then you lose the work.

The Eurostar website states:
Our free wi-fi uses several 3G and 4G signals en route, so the quality of the internet connection will vary – even if the signal on your device looks good – depending on where you are along our route and how many people are online.
If you lose your connection, we’re probably just passing through an area with weak signal. There’s no need to reconnect, though. Once the signal improves, you’ll be connected again automatically.

[Chris in Makati]

The wi-fi on Southern and South West trains between Surrey and London terminals is usually fine, but I seldom bother using it as mobile data is so cheap these days. The only time I might make use of it would be when I’m on a long journey and using my laptop.

[TonyR]

Never bother with it. Always use the cellular network on my phone, iPad or tethered which performs just as well or better. The trains are only using the same networks and you see the performance of their wifi go up and down with the network signal showing on your phone.

[Author]

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