Image: Loco Steve/Flickr
Amtrak has more passengers than ever before, but it still manages to lose loads of potential customers to crummy bus companies that run the same routes. That’s because the bus is a lot cheaper than the train. So much cheaper—some advertise $1 fares—that bad service, smaller seats, traffic jams, and terrifying safety records aren’t enough to send customers to the train station.
There’s no realistic chance Amtrak can lower its prices in the next few years, so it’s looking for another way to win customers: Good Wi-Fi. As in, live Tweet your Scandal marathon on Netflix good. Amtrak has a key advantage over bus companies here: It owns the land its trains run on, so installing the necessary hardware is not big deal.
The Dream of Great Wi-Fi
On Monday, Amtrak announced it is soliciting bids for a proof-of-concept project that would provide at least 25 Mbps of bandwidth to each train running between Boston and Washington, D.C. The publicly-funded railroad, which is operated as a for-profit corporation, has been offering free but mediocre Wi-Fi since 2010. It started with 3G, pulling data from nearby cell towers, and upgraded to 4G in 2013. Today, that service doesn’t cover the entire 457-mile Northeast corridor, and it offers only 10 Mbps per train. To give all its customers at least some of that bandwidth, Amtrak restricts internet use to things like sending email, and bans downloading large files or streaming video.
The company recognizes that’s a pain in the ass. The goal of the new project is to “significantly liberalize or eliminate altogether the usage restrictions,” says Matt Hardison, Amtrak’s chief marketing and sales officer.
Split that bandwidth between the 60 people aboard and you can barely Tweet your frustration.
Great! One problem: the railroad doesn’t know how it’s going to do any of this. It thinks a dedicated trackside radio network, as an alternative or complement to a satellite connection, is a possibility. “We’re really open to proposals from vendors,” says Lenetta McCampbell, senior director of passenger experiences. And it’s not like these proposals will have to start from zero; most of the hardware and knowledge required for a project like this is already developed, says Anton (Tony) Kapela, vice president of data center and network services for tech solutions company 5NINES. “I think it’s physically possible, I think the technology exists.”
Some bus companies offer Wi-Fi on board, but it usually stinks. This isn’t surprising. Buses, which travel down public highways, typically use a single mobile broadband connection to Internetify an entire bus. Split that bandwidth between the 60 people aboard and you can barely Tweet your frustration.
This isn’t an unsolvable problem. A team of students and faculty at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has a plan that would connect bus riders to multiple wireless providers simultaneously to improve speed and coverage. At this point, it’s just an idea. And even if the technology were commercialized, bus companies would need to spend money and then keep everything maintained properly–not something they’re especially good at. Right now, you’re probably better off using your own cell service, especially if you have an LTE phone that can work as a hotspot.
Amtrak’s Big Advantage
Barring an unexpected coup d’état, bus companies will never own the highway system. They’ll always be dependent on the cell towers other companies build. Same goes for airlines, which can steal away business travelers with prices and travel times. But airborne Wi-Fi comes from towers on the ground or satellites in space. Airlines own neither.
Amtrak has the advantage of owning the land its tracks run on. “The ownership of land and rights of way certainly lends efficiency,” says Kapela. The railroad could do everything itself: build the sites, run the base stations, buy some 10-gigabit Ethernet ports, and deliver service to riders, possibly for a fee. “That may sound like a lot of work, but they already track and deal with thousands of managed signaling devices fairly well. A few hundred more base stations wouldn’t represent a large paradigm shift,” says Kapela.
First, we have to see what kinds of ideas are submitted to Amtrak. McCampbell wouldn’t comment on who Amtrak expects bid, or how much the system would cost. The latter is a big question for a company that has a lot of projects in the works and not much money to spend on them. In its 2015 budget request to Congress, Amtrak asked for $1.62 billion, 16 percent more than it got in 2014. Amtrak wants to build a high-speed rail network. It needs to upgrade its aging infrastructure, much of which is 80 to 150 years old and “will require extensive repair for safe and efficient operations,” according to a 2012 report. Just how much money it will get hasn’t been determined yet.
Proposals for making this happen are due tomorrow, and Amtrak will evaluate entries over the summer. The winning project could be tested as early as this winter, on a ten-mile stretch of track south of Wilmington, Delaware. The results will determine if the project is technically and financially doable over the full 457-mile corridor.
If everything works out, Amtrak will have a better shot at convincing cheapskate riders that the train is the better way to travel. If that’s not enough to win them over, at least those who already prefer the railroad can catch up on those Scandal episodes they missed.
No comments:
Post a Comment