Jan

27

Via Rail WiFi

Tagged | | 8 Comments

With my new MacBook in tow, I trekked off to my parents’ house in London this weekend. It was a fine time; I spent some time with my parents, had a good sleep in my bed there, and saw Cloverfield (quick review: It’s awesome). I’m now on the train back to Toronto trying to use Via Rail’s WiFi access (quick review: It sucks). The service is easy enough to sign up for (it takes about 2 minutes and a credit card) and is reasonably cheap ($9 for 24 consecutive hours). Unfortunately, the service itself is very splotchy. It drops the signal every 3 minutes and when it is working, it’s very slow. For example, I was downloading a file at about 0.5kb/s, and while I typed that last sentence, Adium was disconnected. Twice. Sure, it’s probably useful if you’re 45 and on your corporate issue laptop trying to check your email and reading the New York Times, but for anyone trying to read feeds in Google Reader or conducting a chat on MSN, it’s impossible to use.

They mean well, but its execution is flawed. It’s very likely that the main source of the problems is with the satellite uplink that connects the train from to the Internet, but this is the 21st century. Haven’t basic satellite issues been worked out by now? [By the way, 5 minutes later, Adium is just reconnecting]

Were I on a 5 or 6 hour train ride, to Montreal, for example, I would probably buy time on the network, but in its current implementation, the service is much too unreliable to be used for just two hours.

Via Rail, you get an A for effort, but a D for implementation.