Scotland to Add WiFi on Trains

ScotRail, one of the major train companies in Scotland, received a $250,000 contract from the government to start a three-month pilot trial on various train routes in order to provide free WiFi to passengers as they travel along the various towns. This will be the first major spending in getting trains to offer Internet connectivity, and is part of the government's overall goal to deliver WiFi across the country.

This trial follows a long consultation project, and might prove to be a challenging project, since the train routes follow semi-rural areas, places that typically don't have great connectivity to begin with. Still, the railroad went through a long signal strength survey to find the best way to accomplish this goal and fulfill its contract.

The initial trial will cover routes that go primarily between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and the WiFi devices will be outfitted to four Class 170 trains, each consisting of three wagons each. To test the best system, two different types of routers were retained -- the R3200 from Nomad Digital, and the X6 from Icomera. Their tasks will be to take the cellular signal from mobile networks and convert it to WiFi, so that passengers aboard the train can get access to the Internet in an uninterrupted fashion. This may prove challenging to the software since the trains are likely to pass through various coverage areas, and the routers will have to handle switching between these carriers seamlessly. ScotRail wants to see which solution will best answer this challenge.

Another challenge that the company has to face is how to offer free and fair access. If, for example, one passenger decides to use a lot of bandwidth by watching full HD videos streaming from the web, this may impact other users. Instead of blocking access to high bandwidth sites, they instead opted to have the available bandwidth split evenly between users, so that anyone trying to run bandwidth hogging applications may find that there just isn't enough allocated to get an optimal experience, so that the other passengers aren't affected. For now, 3G is being used, but with 4G around the corner and being deployed now, ScotRail and the government representatives are thinking long term, and will want to adapt the system to work on higher speed networks as well.

It's unknown yet whether the WiFi access will remain free after the pilot program, should it be rolled out to a wider area. Several areas have to be tested and many questions answered before a full determination can be done. With the consultation now complete, the trials will be free to proceed, and the government hopes to have all the answers for a wider deployment by 2014. Just recently, London announced it will be getting free WiFi just in time for the Olympics.