The UK government’s insistence that every train in the UK has free WiFi onboard over the next two years, is an abject lesson in unintended consequences. It is likely that this decision has either frozen all activity or that it will result in an unusable service – the opposite of what was intended.
Chairing a meeting run by TechUK this week, on how to monetize WiFi on trains, Faultline was shocked at how “hamstrung” all the major elements in the network chain were, from UK train operating company franchises, to specialists WiFi players, to MNOs.
The simple truth is that insisting that every train has free WiFi means making less profit to return to the government or increasing ticket prices (a practice that is regulated, therefore punishable by fines) or producing a service where the WiFi is token and unusable. People who rely on providing WiFi to trains admitted that they used their cellphones attached to LTE, rather than put up with inconsistent, slow WiFi as it exists on most train services in the UK.
The only services which currently work well are charged at between £4 an hour up to £30 a month, as much or more than a commercial broadband fixed line at home. And the low uptake at those rates means that no operator wants to be involved.
In the UK Rethink could only find about 200 trains, out of a total of 3,500 that have WiFi installed and yet attendees assured us that it was at least 500 and perhaps it was 25% of the total. But everyone agreed that where it had been installed, it stopped working in tunnels and in rural parts of the country, and while it actually did work, it offered connections that meant no-one could work on the train.
The technical discussion that took up most of the morning drew on successful installations all over the world, and this shows that with the right will, and all relevant players aligned behind an agreed approach, a “decent” service could be available on a train. But decent equated to at best 60 Mbps throughout a train, and since the event was called the Gigabit train, it seemed to fall well wide of the vision the organizers and the UK government has for WiFi service.
Initially everyone agreed that the rail companies are dependent upon MNOs to achieve the Gigabit train, but later louder portions of the audience decried this, suggesting that anything based on expensive spectrum would lead to high costs, and since the mandate is that service must be free to the consumer, the higher the costs, the more this becomes a cost center, rather than a profit center, and the more it erodes rail operator profits.
The discussion we chaired on monetization first took a look at advertising, which per annum seemed to be about all that could be extracted out of the 20 million rail passengers which travel regularly, claimed Toby Treacher, a director at Digital Nerve and ex-of Network Rail. He concluded that £40 billion of work could be done on WiFi, if everyone could work on a train all the time, adding that value to the Gross Domestic Product if a way could be found to achieve it. But he also estimated that only £8 million a year of advertising could be used to fuel it, far too little.
Another speaker argued that there was a richness of data available from WiFi transactions, and that we could do away with that National Rail Passenger Survey each year, and that passenger counts and the compilation of email lists for the rail companies would result in value being extracted. Few were optimistic that it would be enough to pay for the creation of 3,500 “villages at speed,” as another speaker encouraged us to think about the problem.
There was agreement that there was no one killer app, and that the right solution was to take the various technical reporting and telemetry apps, what speaker Kevin Collis, director of Broadband Access Strategies referred to as Rail Apps, routing and safety data, which report on the condition of each train, and move them to a common WiFi platform, leaving enough spare capacity over to allow passenger WiFi. Collis reminded everyone that as of now these were all on proprietary platforms, and to get a single platform for this would mean the agreement of a host of companies including Nomad, Icomera, Siemens, Alstrom, TE Connectivity, Thales and Level 3, around a single platform. As it is these firms already provide proprietary versions of these systems. Not something that is going to change in two years.
But right now this data only amounts to a few Gigabits of data each month, and currently this is sent over cellular using specialized SIMS, and specialist networking equipment, which reduces latency and which is highly secure. It took just one stern voice from Cisco warning about “hacking” the controls of a train and taking control, to make most of the audience shudder and the idea of putting this on a single platform and sharing it with traveler WiFi was no longer universally welcomed.
We explored alternative angles to the problem. Might the Train Operating Companies put their own backhaul services into segments of the track that currently have blank spots and actually charge the MNOs for some of this bandwidth, to get access to customers 100% of the time? Rather than only when their network could reach them? It sounded okay in principle until you get to thinking about authentication and AAA servers, the attitude that MNOs have to any “untrusted” traffic from outside their own networks, and the investment would be high, and train companies have little cash.
There then ensued a discussion about whether or not satellite could act as a point to multipoint backhaul for the Gigabit Train, and while we felt it could, most felt that was asking too much of satellite. But the truth is that asking LTE to deliver what satellite broadband cannot, is all back to front. Satellite spectrum costs far less, and with modern HTS and UTS satellites taking costs per Gbps to get into space from over $100 million in space, to around $3 million it must surely be possible – except for latency and those tunnels once again. But even with that approach adopted, the trains could not yet be fitted with satellite antennas which protruded any more than 10 centimeters, rather than the 40cm devices which are common today – creating another stand-off or an investigation into flat antennas.
At the end of the session Faultline summarized the outcome of the market that the UK government’s insistence on WiFi would lead to a form of “civil disobedience” in that WiFi would be put onto trains, but nothing like 1 Gbps, and that once the insistence that WiFi is free is out of the equation (next election), then disruptors with deep pockets such as local fixed line operators like Sky, Virgin, TalkTalk or BT being ask for help, selling access on the back of their respective broadband ownership – i.e. their customers would get it free and the rail network would be a way of attracting customers. Ditto for a single MNO, taking on the costs if only its customers got free Voice over WiFi calls, making commuting a way of combatting churn.
But right now, the UK government’s edict that train operators must add Free WiFi and they cannot work with any single operator entity, makes all that pie in the sky for the time being.