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All aboard with Wi-Fi on VIA Rail Canada
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July 10, 2003 (Computerworld) -- VIA Rail Canada is taking Wi-Fi mobile, kicking off a four-month test of high-speed Internet service on selected passenger trains in the Montreal-Toronto corridor in partnership with Bell Canada International Inc. and Intel Canada.
Guy Faulkner, product manager for corridor service at VIA Canada's national passenger train operator, said he views Wi-Fi access as a potential competitive advantage for the company. VIA plans to test the Wi-Fi service in first-class cars, which cater to business passengers. Montreal-based VIA already markets its first class as conducive to business traveler productivity, and Faulkner said he believes Wi-Fi is a good match with the railroad's marketing campaign.
VIA routinely surveys passengers, Faulkner said, and more and more have lately asked about onboard Internet service. VIA will offer the service for free during the test while it conducts an online survey of users to determine how much they would pay for it. After the test, VIA will evaluate usage and survey responses before deciding whether to seek vendors to provide the service.
Bell Canada, a division of BCE Inc. in Montreal, has equipped the VIA test trains with three separate wireless systems to support the passenger Internet service, according to Bryan Pilsworth, associate director of Bell's Wireless Accelerator Fund. Broadband service to the train is provided by high-speed data service beamed from Bell's ExpressVu satellite system, which offers Internet service as well as television. ExpressVu provides a data rate of 400Kbit/sec., but Pilsworth said Bell Canada has tweaked the downlink to the train to operate at higher speeds. He declined to provide details.
The satellite signals are fed into an onboard server provided by PointShot Wireless, an Ottawa-based start-up focused on providing wireless services to mobile markets. The PointShot server feeds the satellite signal to a Wi-Fi access point in a first-class car that users can access from laptop or handheld computers.
The return signal from user laptops is fed from the access point to the server and then over Bell's terrestrial Code Division Multiple Access 1xRTT network, which has an average data rate of 70Kbit/sec. to 80Kbit/sec., Pilsworth said. He said train passengers experience "better-than-dial-up" data rates, which max out at 56Kbit/sec. He again declined to be more specific.
Warren Gallagher, chief technology officer at PointShot, said the onboard server and the company's software manage the wireless networks and use compression and caching technologies. Gallagher declined to identify the server architecture, citing competitive reasons.
Although a train could briefly lose signals from either the satellite or terrestrial network, Gallagher said, the PointShot system masks these outages from the user.
The VIA test is the first operational use of the PointShot system, but Gallagher said the company has signed a contract with a U.S. rail operator. He declined to identify that company.
Pilsworth said that as far as he knows, VIA Rail is the only passenger train operator in the world that offers real time, high-speed wireless data service. In April, Icomera AB in Goteberg, Sweden, said it signed a contact with Linx AB, a Swedish passenger rail company, to provide onboard wireless service using satellites for the downlink and multiple channels on a mobile phone network for the return. And RailTel Corp. in New Delhi has reached an agreement to provide Wi-Fi service to Indian Railways later this year, according to the Hindustan Times.
Gallagher said his company plans to deploy its service in Europe and has talked to the Virgin Rail unit of Virgin Group Ltd. in London. He said PointShot could also provide Wi-Fi service to passenger ferry operators, such as British Columbia Ferry Services Inc.
Amtrak, the Washington-based U.S. national rail passenger network, would like to offer Wi-Fi service, but "financially we can't do it" now, according to spokeswoman Karina Vanveen.
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