At the beginning of the month, I read an article in a magazine that advised Wifi installation on Southeastern train services should be complete by June 2018. This was the first time I had seen any information about the date by which Wifi should be available on Southeastern services.
On Wednesday 16 May I successfully accessed the Internet and used my e-mail service between London Bridge and Hither Green on a Class 375 train, so it looks promising. However; my next four journeys on Southeastern trains were not good: I eventually managed to connect to the Internet, but it could not support my e-mail service. On my next journey I could connect to the Internet but again it could not support my e-mail service. I use Microsoft Outlook for e-mail, I thought I would try a different e-mail service provider to see if this was successful. BT Mail will work on Southeastern trains, so why does Microsoft Outlook not work?
There are apparently a few lines, including High Speed 1, where reception is intermittent.
What have other rail travellers’ experience with Southeastern wifi been please?
If the signal strength has been ‘Excellent’ I’ve found it’s worked very well. I’ve noticed that a few Thameslink trains also have wi-fi.
However, I suspect Keith was in a coach in a unit that was not yet wi-fi equipped but that he was receiving an overspill signal from further along the same train.
In the early days I often found a signal present but could not use it: presumably it was overspill, hence too weak and / or suffering from contention as up to four unequipped coaches battled to piggyback on to a signal meant for only one, a case of Phones In eXcess of Capacity !
(This is a bit of an elaboration of some of the things i’ve mentioned via Twitter, but it’s much easier to explain when you don’t have a character limit!)
Travelling frequently between Tonbridge and London I find the WiFi service to be within the realms of expectation. Per-device speeds are capped at 2.5Mbit/sec, but once you’ve used your 50MB allowance the cap is reduced to 0.03Mbit/sec – still enough to slowly load webpages, send emails etc but you won’t be streaming on that!
The WiFi solution itself is provided by Icomera, who provide WiFi for many transport services both here in the UK and abroad (e.g. they also provide WiFi on Thameslink and Southern, and abroad Deustse Bahn. They’re in use in many other places too, but that’s the ones I know of!).
The access points inside the carriage connect to roof-mounted antennas which connect to the 3G/4G network for data backhaul. The signal received by these antennas does tend to be a good bit better than the signal received inside the carriage, and they also support some of the faster 4G standards. However, it is somewhat at the mercy of the deployed commercial mobile network capacity, and hence the resulting signal strength map. The backhaul is provided by both EE and Vodafone, and so current coverage is as good as it can get without them deploying further masts (getting coverage from o2 or Three wouldn’t help as they share their physical mast infrastructure with Vodafone and EE respectively).
One particular challenge the network operators have had with improving coverage on the railway network is access. Typically, they have not been able to use Network Rail land, or Network Rail’s GSM-R masts (for driver radio communications) and so locating masts near the railway is a challenge – especially when the railway is then located within a cutting and moving at speed! One area that will hopefully help with this was a recent consultation put out by the DCMS, which is proposing opening up Network Rail’s land and existing GSM-R masts to commercial operators in order to improve mobile coverage on railways – in addition to looking at other solutions for providing large amounts of bandwidth to the trains. Although the consultation has now closed, further information about it can be viewed at https://www.gov.uk/government/news/better-mobile-and-wi-fi-connectivity-for-rail-passengers .
If you’re curious to see what the current coverage from both EE and Vodafone is like along the route (beyond Southeastern’s own map!), cellmapper.net is a very useful resource – showing you real world signal strength as collected by users (as opposed to the estimates that the providers put out), as well as the locations of masts. You can see for example that between Hildenborough and the start of the Sevenoaks Tunnel, both EE and Vodafone’s coverage is weak with no nearby masts. Things are better in Sevenoaks itself, but again between the exit of the Polhill Tunnel and Orpington signal is again very weak – not helped at all by the very deep cuttings and relatively sparse population!
I do sometimes find that the WiFi solution doesn’t work at all – and there’s generally two reasons;
1) The access point is broadcasting, but not handing out IP addresses.
2) The access point is broadcasting and handing out IP addresses, but the captive portal has a SSL certificate issue and cannot be submitted.
If you do run in to an issue like this, do let Icomera know – the best way is to email them at southeastern.support@icomera.com with details as to what’s not working, the service you are on and the 5 digit carriage number. Although i’d prefer for the WiFi to ‘just work’, if the problem isn’t reported it won’t be fixed!
With regards to Outlook not working, this could be because prior to you accepting the Terms and Conditions, Outlook is unable to establish a secure connection – and does not retry after you have accepted the Terms and Conditions. Normally a restart of Outlook clears that up for me – I do wish Outlook would handle situations like this a bit better!
So to cap that all off, speeds today are what I would expect. They’re not great, but are within what is feasible and possible today. To improve it relies upon the commercial mobile network operators improving their network coverage of the railway which has historically been a challenge. However, there’s potential in the future for deployments of mobile masts on or very close to the railway which should significantly improve things.
As of Jun-18, the service is completely unusable, WiFi signal strength is OK but no service beyond the local access point on any service in my experience.
@ Jimbo
Your first requested URL will always be ‘hijacked’ by the Southeastern welcome page, and if you had asked for a secure (https://) page, the variance may trigger a security alert on your device. Did you tick the ‘Accept Terms and Conditions’ box before trying to browse any further?
I too am unable to access my Outlook emails on about 80% of all journeys using SouthEastern. There must be an inherent problem as I know that I am meeting all the correct protocols (and even ticking the Accept Terms box!).
So frustrating, so would SouthEastern Management like to comment?
Many are saying how the service is reliant on the commercial mobile networks and, whilst true, this is down to design choices made by SouthEastern on a cost basis.
The ECML has on-board WiFi supplied by Icomera (first installed by GNER in 2003, 15 years ago!) which uses the standard cell towers like SouthEastern but also has satellite backup so should there be no cell access then it will fail-over to satellite broadband.
I imagine this is costly (whenever I’ve looked at the cost of satellite data it has been) but works really well for situations where 3G/4G coverage is unreliable.