Features

Broadreach catches the train with PointShot for wireless Internet

It's going to be the year of wireless trains: to foreshadow it, this is the week of WiFi on trains - with the conference on "how to do it" in London attracting a small group, of all the right people. And first out of the blocks is not Virgin, after all, but Great North Eastern Rail.

Nobody will think we're giving away any secrets if we reveal which end of the pioneering spectrum London Underground will be on. It is still muttering fervently about Tetra, an obsolete technology with nothing to recommend it except high cost, low bandwidth, and security no better than 802.1x will give later this year.

The innovators are roaring ahead, and one of the reasons, of course, is that mobile phone coverage is really very bad on many European rail networks, which optimised their masts to cover the motorway mesh.

In the UK, the Virgin train WiFi will be powered by an outsourced consortium, managed by Broadreach, which has been working with Virgin's ISP arm for some time - and which has now linked up with Canadian rail pioneer, PointShot.

By contrast, Great North East, or GNER, is doing it in house, buying Icomera equipment, and installing it on test coaches.

The two systems are - mainly - designed for different purposes. GNER is primarily a long-distance train operator, while Virgin has an awful lot of new Pendolino commuter trains as well as inter city routes. But the choice is controversial, and there's a lot of lobbying going on.

"We think doing it in-house is a mistake," said rival supplier Magnus McEwen-King at Broadreach. "We're going for an outsource solution for Virgin, which will probably launch towards the middle or the end of this year."

His logic is that the system has to be one which is both quick to install, and to maintain: trains don't sit in nice easily accessible locations during office hours where you can send technicians in.

The outsource solution Virgin will be testing over the next few weeks, will combine WiFi and GPRS and GSM and satellite broadband.

It's a system you can try out for yourself if you happen to be in California: Broadreach has signed a partnership with PointCast, which has a working system with Altamont Commuter Express (ACE) which entered trials in August.

Since then, says Pointshot, it has sold a similar system to Amtrak. This is another San Jose commuter service, run by Amtrak's Capitol Corridor intercity train service, operating between the Sierra foothills, Sacramento, Oakland/San Francisco and San Jose. And it also has a trial (successful, technically) in its native Ottawa.

Broadreach, working with Pointshot as a partner, is bringing Pointshot to Europe and expanding its own wireless portfolio to the railways. The Broadreach system differs radically from the typical WISP (wireless ISP) in that it allows you to pay by the minute; and equally radically different in allowing you to bill your normal ISP.

The American Railpoint train technology is impressive, technically.

"How do we do it? We use a combination of backhaul," said Shawn Griffin. "The technology is based on our Railpoint server, which goes into the train; it acts as access point, router, and web server, handling all data compression and cacheing. It's linked to a tracking satellite antenna for download. Then the uplink is provided by bonded CDMA or GSM data in North America; and in Europe, by GSM and GPRS."

The server will compress everything on both sides of the wireless link. "When you're connected, you have a traditional hotspot experience. What we do is manage both ends and the middle. We have the server in the ISP's network, which is connected to the Railpoint in the train; we take all connections, and data, and map it back and forth. Really, we are nothing except the provider of a very smart router, which takes the users so they don't see anything except the Internet."

If the train goes under a tunnel Railpoint will just re-direct the traffic over both sides on bonded cellular channels. Proof of the pudding is three successful trials in North America.

Technically, it's working quite well; the software is happily managing six to20 users per car using the service. But technical success, in the WiFi market, is not the vital achievement; the problem is finding a business model.

Griffin: "Currently the service is free. This is a service provider issue - and a lot depends on pricing issues. But we expect to turn to pay-for-use deals this quarter."

Technology suppliers like Railpoint don't have a free hand on what the operator charges, not only because the operator is going to make the marketing decisions, but also because costs are in the hands of the Internet service providers, whether over satellite or phone. Broadband downstream pricing depends on speed. However, what Railpoint can do, is work wizardry on cacheing. The router has to be a very clever Internet proxy, making sure that the most popular sources are cached and that the cache is refreshed at the right time to guarantee fresh data, but not so soon that nobody accesses the old data before it is updated.

Broadreach thinks it has a big advantage over its rivals, even though it is in the hands of the phone and satellite people for data, because of the number of partnership deals it has struck with people like BT OpenWorld, MMO2, Gric, Ipass, and others - but even more, because of the deals it has done with railway stations.

"The key point," said McEwen-King, "is that this is holistic. We provide a ticket-hall to ticket-hall experience. When we can see a geostationary satellite, we use that. When that is blocked by a hill, we look for a low-earth orbit (LEO) satellite. If that's not available, we switch to GPRS and GSM data. But where our rivals tend to fall down, is when the train comes into the station - and we have 370 stations signed up to make WiFi hotspots available to Broadreach customers. So when the train is under the iron roof of the station, they lose touch with their feed, but we seamlessly switch them to the station hot spot." GNER, by contrast, uses the Wireless Onboard Ethernet which is a Swedish development - and while GNER isn't saying much publicly about how it expects it to work, it has one big plus - it's already going live. Trials are online; public trials start next month on the London to Scotland routes.

This, of course, is the advantage that Scandinavian Governments gave their technology startups by clearing the legislative work to make WiFi legal ahead of other European based rivals. In the same way that it's noticeable how many hotels in Germany, France and Spain have their in-room wireless provided by Scandinavian companies, the transport market isn't going to be easily railroaded into buying American, because the competition, such as icomera, is well established.

One possible other rival to the Americans, Scandinavian company, Appear Networks - now French owned - has allied itself with Pointshot. It isn't really sensible to compare them; they operate in different parts of the infrastructure. But it is another sign of how much of a flying start the Scandinavian governments gave this industry.

What Appear does, is location of users. The company, a major sponsor of this week's two day seminar on "Practical Strategies for Implementing WiFi in Passenger Transport," in London, reckons that it can pinpoint the WiFi user to within one metre - purely in software - and that this makes possible a host of applications which aren't intuitively obvious.

"What's happening is that transport operators are finding that the business model is not clear for public hotspots," claims Xavier Aubry, co-founder of Appear.

His analysis: "High end road warriors are not that numerous. Most people won't pay 10 Euros for two hours online. We want to help wireless operators to increase profits. So first, we deploy a set of applications for existing subscribers - which means it makes more sense to pay that 10 Euros or - even to pay more. And also, we look to find ways to deploy applications for new sets of users."

The obvious users are not paying ones, but can be, nonetheless, profitable "We're talking about the local workforce for location owners," says Aubry.

His company has a server installed in the Connex network for the Stockholm Subway; it started not with a public hotspot, but a "workspot."

"The wireless system initially was there for their own staff, giving customer information. They all have pocket computers, and they are all online, collecting information, answering questions from the public, reporting problems. It's in this situation that our software does things that you could not do without it - pinpointing someone to within a metre, means that emergency assistance for staff becomes much more effective. Someone who is witnessing a problem can do a 'silent alert' without having to say anything or start tapping at menus; the station manager knows exactly where the problem is."

The network can be rolled into situations where you might not expect it. Maintenance staff, for example, benefit hugely from having contact with the office when they go to work on a train or a plane; once the network is fitted to the vehicle, it becomes possible to use it for paying customers.

Aubry found that initially, European train operators were deeply suspicious of the idea of building a single wireless network, and then allowing outside users to share it. It was accepted wisdom that for security reasons, this could not be done.

These days, however, virtual LANs which simply cannot talk to each other are pretty standard, and IT staff recognise that a virtualised network is as isolated as a physically separate one.

Once this breakthrough in understanding is made, paid-for networks become feasible. It might not be possible to justify installing a complete WLAN just for speculative commercial use; but it is very easy to divert some of the existing WLAN to commercial use, where it doesn't have to make an instant profit, observes Aubry.

Appear will be announcing a joint venture with Pointshot next week, targeting ISPs and ISP "facilitators" like Broadreach - a company which is high on Aubry's target list. "Since they are working with Pointshot and we are too, we're hopeful of getting involved in a lot of European businesses, especially railway ones," he said.

Pricing, however, remains a real issue.

"Different journeys involve different spending models," is the way Shawn Griffin sees it. But he accepts that until these theories are put into practice, in real situations, the business model for train WiFi remains speculative. Logically, the market is huge. The market for train-based wireless internet services could be six times bigger than that of airport hotspots, thinks consulting firm BWCS. Their report, "Railway Wireless LAN Services" suggests that worldwide, laptop users "will spend more than 12.6 billion hours on trains during 2003 as compared to just under two billion hours spent at airports."

The BWCS figures, of course, are not including the potential for in-air wireless; Boeing and others have already decided they're going to chase those dollars anyway. But even if in-flight Internet turns out to be another Airfone flop (it's now trying to redeem itself by offering email) this shouldn't cast too much of a doubt on the train model.

McEwen-King distinguishes between commuter and traveller Internet use: "We will be introducing our UK trials as charging trials from day one," he insists. "The free trials have proven there is a market there; people do want the service. We need to get the right takeup rates and pricing."

As the intermediary, of course, he doesn't control final rates: "I charge the service provider, and it's up to them how they price the service in the train. We will do a pay as you go service, charging in the region of what we charge for our current 'Internet cafe' fixed terminal access services - somewhere around the pound for ten minutes kind of level - but that's still significantly cheaper than BT's OpenZone!"

Broadreach thinks that there will be different scales of charge, anyway: "When we look at the long-haul routes, that type of service may be quite expensive. But commuter routes will be different, and we will look at another way of pricing packages for regular commuters. For example, one of my colleagues comes in from Tunbridge Wells, 200 days a year; he wouldn't want to pay five extra pounds per journey!"

But, he reckons, long haul is a far less frequent "and adding five quid to the cost of a ticket from London to Manchester, a 200 pound ticket, is quite reasonable. So packages will vary."

For some journeys, we'll have season ticket pricing; for long-distance, rare trips, people will probably pay 15-30 pounds, he thinks."But you wouldn't want to pay more than five pounds a month or maybe per week for commuter trains. Perhaps £15-30 for a monthly ticket would be reasonable?"

There will be charging options in other areas, too; Broadreach's billing method means they can let high data users pay per minute, and low-data users (like Instant Messaging) per byte. It gives the marketing department something to play with. The optimism level seems high, and it's not hard to understand why. BWCS, in its report, concludes that train hotspot operators "are better positioned than their airport counterparts to build ongoing revenue generating relationships with their passengers." BWCS believes that the higher proportion of regular travellers, coupled with the captive nature of train hotspots also gives them significant advantages in terms of the successful promotion of WiFi services and conversion of laptop users.

BWCS forecasts that WiFi-ready devices will make up more than 80% of all laptops used on trains by 2008. They could easily be underestimating this; and it could happen far quicker, once it catches on with operators. And this week's conference suggests that the train operators are keen to go.

There are exceptions, of course ... it will be interesting to see if London Underground ever gets the idea that WiFi is safe to use in underground trains. The way things are going, London, the first city in the world to have an underground rail system, may well be the last to have an underground Internet.

* Pendolino photo courtesy Hattons Model Railways.