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Wireless on trains pushes WiFi on trains out of the picture

Wireless on trains is developing fast. WiFi on trains, however, looks to be of secondary importance for train operators - and that's a pretty generally accepted consensus, say delegates to today's traincomms convention in London.

What has changed, it seems, is not the technology which is available to train operators; that's the same as it was in the early days of pioneers like Broadreach. There's a choice of technologies to reach a train from the Internet and back - including WiFi, EDGE, HSDPA, and satellite and even WiMAX. They aren't remarkably different from the technologies we had five years back.

It's the business environment that has changed. One presentation was by the supplier of the wireless system for the Sanish operator of the Madrid metro rail system, InfoGlobal, which can seriously offer to sell anybody a full-feature wireless link to do security, train management, integration to the stations, and video surveillance at an off-the peg price.

Jaime Abad, business development manager for InfoGlobal reckons pricing is pretty cheap; around 12,000 Euros per train. That assumes a wireless infrastructure to support the trains, of course, which Abad reckons at around a million Euros per line. "It depends," he added carefully.

The early experiments of train oprators, delegates believe, mostly failed on personnel grounds. Ian Beeby, managing director of Peak Intelligence consulting company, pointed out several examples where staff inside a train company, even a big one, found that there was no route to promotion once they were competent at wireless - and left.

Train operators in the audience are interested in WiFi for passengers, yes; but the early obsession with this has given way to a focus on management information and applications with genuine revenue rewards, or health and safety and law enforcement issues.

"IT staff don't like seeing Joe Hacker sitting on their mission critical networks," said Beeby. "They see security as a primary issue, and won't move ahead on Internet provision to passengers until they find a way of isolating the services completely."

Abad said that the political issues meant that people who could go ahead with WiFi for passengers, would not. "There's the issue of whether it is a service provided by the train operator, or by the rail network," he pointed out. "We can easily provide Internet solutions, but we don't."

See Train Communications Systems 08 for more