In a move that has cynics choking on their own bile and optimists briefly forgetting the colour of the sky, Her Majesty’s Government has announced a bold new plan to bring better WiFi to hundreds of British trains. Yes, the same trains that routinely achieve speeds that would embarrass a geriatric snail on Mogadon will now also offer connectivity so patchy you’ll pine for the days of carrier pigeons and semaphore flags.
The Department for Transport, in its infinite wisdom, has pledged to upgrade 738 train carriages with ‘high-speed’ WiFi, at a cost that would make Scrooge McDuck consider a career change. Passengers can look forward to streaming buffering wheels instead of scenery and fighting over bandwidth with thirteen people watching their ex’s Instagram stories on a loop.
Let us paint a picture. You are on a 7:15 from Paddington to Bristol Temple Meads. You have a deadline, a fragile will to live, and a coffee that has already committed treason by spilling on your laptop. The WiFi promises ‘better connectivity.’ You connect. You are given a captive portal that asks for your email, your firstborn’s name, and the secret shame of your soul. Five minutes later you are connected to a signal that is basically a suggestion. You open a web page. It loads with the speed of a glacier on tranquillisers. You stare at the spinning wheel. It stares back. This is your life now.
But the government insists this is progress. The technology, they claim, will use a new ‘hybrid fibre and mobile’ system that somehow makes your train both a land-based and satellite entity, like a drunk Janus. In theory, this means seamless connectivity through tunnels and across the countryside. In practice, it means your message to your partner saying ‘running late, again’ will arrive just in time for you to explain to them why you missed your stop.
The real question, however, is why now? Why, after decades of treating passengers like livestock on wheels, has the government suddenly discovered the joys of the internet? Could it be that they wish to distract us from the perpetual delays, the cancellations, and the prices that would make a banker blush? Possibly. Or perhaps they simply want us to be able to stream the news of our own delayed arrival in real time.
Let us not forget the sheer potential for bureaucratic absurdity. The project will be run by ‘Great British Railways’ which sounds like a brand of value tea but is actually a new quango designed to oversee rail improvements. I half expect them to send out a press release written in binary. The upgrades are due to be completed by 2024, by which time we will have all been replaced by sentient Teslas anyway.
There is also the small matter of the data. Who owns it? What are they doing with it? Does the government intend to track my frantic Googling of ‘train cancellation compensation form’ and use it against me in some future referendum? The contract to provide the WiFi has been awarded to a company called ‘Nomad Digital’ which sounds like a villain from a cyberpunk novel. I’m sure their terms of service are a thrilling read, if you have a team of lawyers and a lifetime to spare.
In conclusion, this is either the dawn of a new era of connected rail travel or another expensive blunder that will leave us all staring at our phones, watching the bars of signal rise and fall like the fortunes of a seaside arcade. My money, such as it is, is on the latter. But please, do feel free to prove me wrong. I would love nothing more than to eat my words with a side of high-speed download.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a train to catch and a deadline to miss.
