Train companies might be told to stop providing Wi-Fi on trains in an effort to cut costs while train revenues are still below pre-pandemic levels. Unsurprisingly, this has provoked many column inches of outrage, but there’s more to the issue than seems.

Yes, the Department for Transport (DfT) is reviewing the case for free Wi-Fi provision in trains and has cited a survey by the passenger watchdog, Transport Focus which suggests onboard Wi-Fi is a lower priority among travellers than value for money fares, reliability, punctuality and personal security.

Although Transport Focus has pushed back since then noting that “Access to wi-fi is something many passengers now expect as standard. It helps people use their travel time productively and is something which could encourage more people to use rail over other modes.”

If the DfT is looking at cutting costs, then cutting Wi-Fi should be considered in the list. But that assumes that the DfT is returning to the pre-privatisation way of thinking about railways, which is to look at them as a cost that needs to be managed.

For all the various problems that privatisation caused, one of the many benefits was looking at the railways as a service to be provided not a cost to be cut, and the private companies pushed hard to increase passenger numbers — and succeeded — because they knew a better service attracts passengers and that means more money in the till for the train companies. Rail use is now vastly higher than when it was state owned, but if the dead hand of the DfT is returning to the bad old days of worrying about how much a thing costs than how good a service can be, then that is a very bad backwards step.

As Andy Bagnall, chief executive of Rail Partners said: “While there is a need to control costs, the consideration of this proposal is a symptom of the current disjointed management of industry finances where revenue and cost are looked at separately and operators are unable to innovate in response to customer needs.”

Is killing off a feature that is expected to be provided, especially on long journeys really what the DfT is thinking of doing? The threat to train Wi-FI was initially reported by railway writer, Christian Wolmar on his Calling All Stations podcast, and then picked up elsewhere as a bad thing.

However, ironically, the DfT is doing the right thing for one, just for the wrong reason and at the wrong time.

When you think about it, it’s ridiculous that in 2023, once you’ve got settled into your seat on a train, pretty much the first thing you have to do is decide which internet service provider you will use. Do you connect to the station’s Wi-Fi, the coffee shop on the platform by accident, the in-train Wi-Fi, or stick to your phone network?

We still have a tendency to think of Wi-Fi as better than mobile data, and in places it still is. However, increasingly mobile data is better than Wi-Fi, and this is particularly true on the railways. It varies wildly, but there are many times where I will turn off Wi-Fi on my phone to stop it trying to connect to the train service because the mobile network is faster and more reliable.

That will be down to a range of factors, but remember that the Wi-Fi connection inside the train carriage itself has a radio link to the nearby radio towers to provide the connection — and quite often those nearby radio towers are the mobile networks themselves. So by using Wi-Fi, you’re still connecting to the mobile network, only via a Wi-Fi connection instead of direct.

So why are we still deciding to use Wi-Fi at all?

In part, it’s a legacy behaviour. When mobile data first started taking off with 3G services (it had been possible on GSM, but ugh!), the 3G networks were noticeably slower than home internet speeds, and much slower than the newly popular Wi-Fi services that were also starting to arrive at the same time.

Coffee shops learned quickly that providing Wi-Fi lures in customers, and it wasn’t too long before the railways caught on as well.

There’s also an element of captive audience satisfaction. If you sit in a coffee shop and then discover the phone signal is poor, you’re stuck there until you’ve drunk your coffee. And it’s pretty difficult to swap train services in the middle of a journey — so the trains are a captive audience that will be rightly annoyed if their phones don’t work properly if they’re on a train for several hours.

There’s also a cost element, Wi-Fi tends to be cheaper (especially when its free) than using up mobile data allowances, but generally venues that lack a free Wi-Fi service is looked on as inferior to one that provides it.

So, even when the mobile data service is better than the Wi-Fi service, we have a tendency to sign up for the Wi-Fi service.

With ever improving mobile data speeds, is it time to kill off railway Wi-Fi for good?

Yes – but only when the mobile data is more reliable along train lines.

In fact, that’s happening.

Earlier this year, it was announced that the London to Brighton mainline is to get a dedicated mobile network upgrade aimed at improving services in trains. The mobile networks should be encouraged — if not forced — to focus on upgrading their service along the railway corridors. They regularly tell us their annual above inflation rate price rises are needed to fund upgrades, so let’s see some of that money spent along the railways.

When HS2 trains start running, they are going even further – there won’t be any Wi-Fi at all in the trains. Instead, they are being fitted with small mobile network boosters in each carriage that will ensure five bar signal strength along the entire route.

So, the train companies are already on a path that we should all be taking anyway, to stop needing to decide which internet provider we will use when sitting in a train.

That the DfT is looking at the issue today because it wants to shave a few millions off the cost of running the trains is the wrong reason to kill off the Wi-Fi service. Especially as in places the mobile networks aren’t good enough — you don’t want a repeat of Vodafone’s inane decision to kill off London Underground Wi-Fi several years before the mobile network replacement is ready (decision reversed two years later).

However, if the DfT were to be more innovative, and tell the mobile networks to fill in the gaps in their service along the railways, and fund the hardware upgrades needed to boost the signal inside the carriages  — will we need Wi-Fi at all?

Probably not.