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Stable 1.2 Gigabit/s Internet achieved in moving train in Switzerland
- atemerev 6y agoSwiss mobile internet is fantastic. It works in trains, it works in the mountains, it works in the cities, it works everywhere. OK, the country is small, but still it is quite an achievement.
- Scoundreller 6y agoMeanwhile in Canada, our providers use the “it’s a big country so that’s why it’s stupidly expensive in the few percent of the territory that’s covered” excuse. Meanwhile, in Europe you can take a train and have good coverage in the middle of nowhere through a base station that probably sees 20 minutes of heavy use per day...
- niij 6y agoSurely population density plays a huge role in the relatively lower coverage of both US and Canada compared to Europe. Switzerland: 206/sqkm Germany: 240/sqkm Eurozone as a whole: ~100/sqkm Canada: ~4/sqkm USA: 35/sqkm
- smcl 6y agoThe key phrase in the comment you're replying to is "in the few percent of the territory that’s covered". The vast majority of the Canadian population live in highly urbanised pockets.
- niij 6y agoThey do, but they want reception outside of those densely urbanized pockets. They want reception on the highways between the cities, at their lake house, or if they live in a rural area. The denser population subscribers still pay for the infrastructure in low-density areas.
- bleepblorp 6y agoCanada's population density figure is deceptively low because most of Canada's landmass is completely uninhabited. Most of the Canadian far north has an even lower population density than the Sahara desert. Canada's population is tightly clustered into a small number of urban areas that have population densities comparable to places like Philadelphia or Vienna. Despite this, Canada's population centers have nowhere near the quality of public infrastructure of Vienna.
- dbetteridge 6y agoThis is all accurate, but people still expect reception and speed when travelling between those dense population centres by road or rail. Much like Australia, this means providers build the infrastructure to supply those areas but then the cost is recovered from the dense population areas. Theres also some capatilism nonsense oligopolies thrown in there, but that's the core issue.
- gruez 6y ago> This is all accurate, but people still expect reception and speed when travelling between those dense population centres by road or rail. Why doesn't the consumer have a choice? I'd be willing to sacrifice coverage in rural areas in exchange for 50-80% discounted tariffs, for instance.
- ludston 6y agoBecause you don't want to increase the class divide between rural and non-rural areas. Or maybe you do, but most of us don't, and you have to conform to our values if you want to live with the benefits that a society of those values have produced.
- bleepblorp 6y agoThere is no evidence that cutting coverage in rural areas will reduce prices elsewhere. The Canadian situation is bad-to-zero coverage in rural areas and the world's most expensive cell phone service (think of plans that charge $10 CAD per GB of data) in developed regions. The money that Canada's two cell phone networks didn't spend covering rural areas didn't reduce prices; it disappeared into shareholder pockets.
- Ambroos 6y agoIt really depends where you go in Europe. In German mobile connections are notoriously bad. I've had moments where I'm standing in the middle of Aachen struggling to get a single byte through. Then there's Belgium (especially Flanders) where I can't remember the last time I didn't have at least solid HSPA+ available.
- waltherg 6y agoGerman here. The latter statement doesn't really hold for us. Super patchy coverage on trains.
- lawl 6y ago> German here. The latter statement doesn't really hold for us. Super patchy coverage on trains. Germany has a different issue, you have multiple providers and those combined have pretty good coverage. I visit germany frequently by train and roam and it kicks me from provider to provider. Iirc your providers are mandated by the gov to also service these rather unprofitable areas, which they do. They split up the uninhabited regions, build a few antennas there. So if you have a plan with a national provider you get shitty coverage. If you roam and can use any provider, it's actually mostly fine (in my experience). I don't understand why they don't do national roaming in these areas.
- cure 6y agoEspecially considering the terrain, which is not forgiving. Those mountains really make coverage interesting.
- trox 6y agoAs much as I love the swiss mobile network - saying that it works everywhere is wrong. In the mountains you still have smaller regions without service from all major providers. Especially when you are high up, you have to know that you cannot rely on 100% on your mobile connection. You can take a look at the Swissom mobile coverage map here (german): https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.jsf?netztyp=lte https://scmplc.begasoft.ch/plcapp/pages/gis/netzabdeckung.js...
- orf 6y agoI once got a text message welcoming me to Switzerland from a commercial flight from Rome to London. The data rates my provider gave me in the message where ridiculous (10+ GBP per mb), but it's impressive I got it while on an airplane.
- laurencerowe 6y agoFrom a plane you're usually in direct line of sight to many, many mobile network towers at once. Mobile phone use is banned on planes because of the interference this could cause with ground based networks.
- Nextgrid 6y agoThis is not entirely correct. The majority of mobile antennas are directional and are optimised to cover a ground area and not waste transmit power broadcasting into the air.
- pilsetnieks 6y agoThey could have been aimed at an angle in a mountainous area.
- est31 6y agoSwisscom is one of the leaders in Europe when it comes to 5G. They had 90% coverage until the end of 2019 for example. https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/swisscom-chef-zu-5g-man-haette-mehr-aufklaeren-koennen https://www.srf.ch/news/wirtschaft/swisscom-chef-zu-5g-man-h...
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- singhrac 6y agoI would honestly pay significantly higher taxes if we could get Swiss-quality train service in parts of the US (and especially if they have good internet). When I traveled Boston to NY in the past, compare my flight experience vs Amtrak. Flight: - Take $25 Uber to airport and get there 1 hour early to go through security and wait. - Fly to JFK (1h 20m) - land, wait to get off, go through terminal again, then take $50 Uber to Manhattan (or $20 via public transit but god forbid you are even slightly confused about transfers). Train: - Take the Red Line to South Station, getting there 15 minutes early - Take a 4 hour train to Penn Station, with essentially a full desk, no real baggage limitation, freedom to walk around, and good wifi. - Walk outside into Manhattan Admittedly, I took the Acela, which is business class, but almost all comparisons hold true for the NE Regional except you'd have to tether your own connection and it's a bit more crowded. The main thing is that this 4 hour chunk of time is uninterrupted by checkpoints and transfers and whatever else. It's relaxing rather than stressful. People tell me the reasons that everything is more expensive than in Switzerland is because (a) the US is bigger, so infrastructure cost more [and flights scale easier], (b) the US is bigger, so city-to-city distances eat more of day up, or (c) labor unions make costs higher. But is (b) a real problem if you can work on the train? And I don't really get (c).
- jeffbee 6y agoYou wouldn't even need to pay higher taxes. The American system of private cars on public roads is dramatically more expensive than the Swiss train system.
- jdminhbg 6y agoThe American train system is also drastically more expensive than the Swiss train system.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoCheaper to just move to Switzerland.
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- snarkypixel 6y agoJust as a fun thought experiment, what /new/ things could be possible if we had 1Terabit/s?
- veb 6y agotricky one. i've had 1Gbit internet here in nz for a few years now, and heck I'm usually on wireless which sorta caps out about 20MB/s (eventually I'll spring for a new router), but when they installed my connection at my current place and the ONT they put in was basically a router (even had wireless antennas on it). I asked why, and the fella said that when they upgrade me to 4Gbit, the specific ONT he installed would be able to utilise it and won't need the router anymore. honestly, it's more than enough to have 50 TVs streaming Netflix or YouTube, the computers downloading stuff, phones being used and so on. I am really not sure how 1Tbit would even matter for 99% of the population. Maybe if streaming (actual) 4k became a thing. Perhaps for remote-gaming, but latency would need to be very low. I cannot imagine the latency on a train.
- ngngngng 6y agoComputers could use small local hard drives and download what you need instantly. All of your documents would be backed up into the cloud because your entire hard drive would essentially be "the cloud"
- the8472 6y agoBandwidth does not eliminate light speed latency or guarantee IOPS. Flipping through an image album or loading game assets could suffer.
- Firerouge 6y agoWith that much bandwidth, you'd just prefetch every single photo before the user was done viewing the first.
- phinnaeus 6y agoBandwidth != latency
- always_left 6y agoAmazing that they can achieve that yet I'm in the bay area and I'm in a never-ending war with Comcast to achieve 50mbp/s
- pkaye 6y agoI can get 400mbp/s in the bay area. And I can upgrade it to a gigabit. Have you asked them to run diagnostics on the lines. Mine was damaged somewhere in the attic so the put in new lines and it has bee good afterwards.
- BHSPitMonkey 6y agoAvailability of fiber vs cable vs DSL vs WISP to homes in the bay area varies wildly from neighborhood to neighborhood (even from one block to the next). It's a little crazy that even in SF proper this is still an issue in 2020, but it turns out legacy infrastructure is simply hard to work with.
- systemvoltage 6y agoHmm... This is not possible. The entire bay area has 1 Gbps capability offered by Comcast.
- some-guy 6y agoEven if this is true, it's only 1gbps download. Thankfully I have access to Monkeybrains. Our speed is 500mpbs down and up, no data cap, $35 a month. Unfortunately they're not widely available.
- pdxandi 6y agoI just cancelled Comcast this week and am in the Bay Area too. I've been going (polite) rounds with their customer support since March. Constantly losing connection, uploads peak at 1Mbps, horribly unreliable. I paid for their 110Mbps plan and have worked remotely for many years. Video dropping all the time, router hanging. After upgrading all my equipment because they wouldn't admit fault, I got a tech to come out who was completely candid because I showed him my modem SNR and power levels and he knew I wasn't messing around. Without fail, he pointed to the pole top node and said that's the problem. It was Sunday and the realtime congestion was near 80%. He said it was scheduled for upgrade but everything is delayed because of supply chain issue in China. That was all I needed to hear. Canceled that day, got AT&T copper (no fiber here), and it's been solid so far.
- screye 6y agoAnd here in the US, the 2 most scenic amtrak routes, the Empire Builder and Zephr can't guarantee even 2G internet.
- vinay427 6y agoThe routes in Switzerland are infinitely less remote, to be fair. I've lived in both countries and it's really orders of magnitude different in this respect. If you're on a (passenger) train in Switzerland even in the most rural and mountainous areas of Wallis or Graubünden, you're still not in what most Americans would consider to be the "middle of nowhere." EDIT: minor clarifications
- stabbles 6y agoSwitzerland does have the Gotthard Base Tunnel aka the longest railway tunnel in the world: 57km or 35.5mi. Anecdotally I believe the current 4g connection is best in the very front of the train, but gets worse if you're in the back.
- eCa 6y agoI don’t remember where I was sitting, but the connection was way better than expected - even in the middle of the tunnel. This was almost four years ago.
- saagarjha 6y agoI used to use the dead zones on the Coastal Starlight route to get off of Hacker News and get some reading done. I can't imagine this getting better anytime soon.
- phab 6y agoIt's interesting that they state that the train was moving, but not how fast. My understanding was that one of the challenges with doing good mobile broadband on trains (esp. for VoIP applications) is how seamlessly you manage the handover between cells makes a big difference to real-world usability. If the train was going pretty slowly that would obviously make your time-per-cell a lot higher / % of time spent performing handoff a lot lower...
- BuildTheRobots 6y agoHandover is a massive non-trivial problem - I'm amazed you're the only one commenting on it. GSM-R was modification to the 2G mobile phone specification specifically to help with high speed handover, but being 2G it gives pretty awful data speeds (1mbit max iirc). If you google for LTE-R it seems there's special provisions to bring that fast handover ability to 4G & 5G networks. As well as the actual radio layer, you've also got the mobility management side of things to consider, for example your IP address. If you've got a video streaming or a SIP call going then when you connect to the next radio tower your IP address has to move across as do any established data sessions - it's not just a case of getting a new DHCP lease and cracking on, there's some serious network orchestration and session management happening too. (I'm convinced I read something a few years ago that one of the LTE design goals was to allow handover when moving at 200mph (that number seems stuck in my head), but I'm failing to find any mention of it outside of the LTE-R results).
- Nextgrid 6y ago> your IP address has to move across That’s handled at a higher level though. If you manage to get the lower level handover running fast enough, the IP side of things shouldn’t be a problem (as all the traffic goes to the GGSN or whatever LTE’s equivalent of that is).
- BuildTheRobots 6y ago> the IP side of things shouldn’t be a problem (as all the traffic goes to the GGSN or whatever LTE’s equivalent of that is). I'm not sure it's quite that simple. One of the things LTE started (and 5G continues) is to push more and more of this to the edge of the network. Traffic from the UE does get tunnelled through the Serving Gateway (S-GW), but there can be multiple SGW's on a network. Mobility management is also a big enough issue that the Mobility Management Entity (MME) is an entity unto itself on the block diagram. It's also worth pointing out that eNodeB's (the radios) can now talk directly to each other via X2 and can actually hand over a subscriber without particularly involving the core network. tldr: I think it's enough of a problem for it to be not entirely trivial. https://yatebts.com/documentation/concepts/lte-concepts/ https://yatebts.com/documentation/concepts/lte-concepts/
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoThey are using the same technique they use in Japan. In Tokyo, you get full signal strength, wherever you are (even in tunnels going underwater). That's because they have mobile antennas everywhere, including lining all the railway lines. I'll bet that their service ain't so cheap, though (I was roaming, when I was there, and that was definitely not cheap).
- ubanholzer 6y agoCheapest 4g flatrate subscription in CH is 25€/m. Average is 60-70€/m
- tgsovlerkhgsel 6y agoI don't understand how the more expensive providers can still have customers. Same network, same conditions, different label on the box, 3x the price, at a price point where it should matter to most people...
- rsynnott 6y agoNot sure about the situation in Switzerland, but it might not be the same network. I use a somewhat more expensive provider (20 euro topup/month for 10GB data, unlimited everything else), because the one that does it for 10 euro is using a different tower network with poorer coverage and much higher congestion (at least in the areas I'm concerned with).
- folli 6y agoIt's not the same network. There are three providers in Switzerland. From my own experience the most expensive one (Swisscom, by whom this article is) has much better coverage in the mountaineous areas compared to the other two.
- soziawa 6y agoIt is, Wingo is 24 CHF a month on the Swisscom network. Its also owned by Swisscom. The main differentiation is support.
- aaron695 6y agoMusk: SpaceX's Starlink Internet Service Will Work in High-Speed Moving Vehicles https://www.pcmag.com/news/musk-spacexs-starlink-internet-service-will-work-in-high-speed-moving-vehicles?amp=true https://www.pcmag.com/news/musk-spacexs-starlink-internet-se...
- justicezyx 6y agoThe other day, a friend who has been working in mainland China for a while, shared that China's logistic networks have enabled a distinct manufacturing process. There, one can expect most goods be delivered next day, across hundreds of city hubs. That efficiency allows factories to have far more choices of their locations that can achieve the same overall efficiency as the centralized factories decades ago. I thought about it for a while, one conclusion I got is that, unless US significantly curb the capitalism freedom in business activities, there is no chance that one can revert the centralization of the global manufacturing inside mainland China. Simply put, the logistic networks for both goods and people, and many other investment, makes mainland China the best manufacturing hub. That's a straightforward economy outcome.
- jensneuse 6y agoMeanwhile in Germany you constantly lose your internet connection outside of large cities.
- tomglynch 6y agoTravelling between cities in Australia by train you'd be lucky to have (mobile phone) internet for 5% of the trip.
- yxhuvud 6y agoMy impression of German infrastructure is that it is 15 years behind their neighbours, in basically all areas.
- mullsork 6y agoOr if you're in Berlin, you lose your internet connection inside the large city as well. Seems to have improved greatly in the last two or three years though.
- samoa42 6y agothb it is very dependent on the location. ie. i get good 4g signal in most of the forests in bavaria but no signal at all in the lobby of my local hospital.
- nickik 6y agoThe can brag about this as much as they want, but there are huge gaps in connectivity on major routes. Like literally 2G connection. I ride Luzern-Zürich daily and there are major parts where its terrible, and I believe this is one of the densest lines. Even right in front of Zürich where there is lots of population. And this not the only place by far, even basic low quality video doesn't really work well on my routes. Edit: I'm using a different provider, but I am fairly certain you would have the same problem with that one.
- causality0 6y agoI'm surprised this was an issue. I've never had trouble maintaining a stable 4G connection when traveling at 80mph down the highway. I'd be interested in some reasons why a train is a much tougher situation.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- TeeMassive 6y agoTrains, Fast Internet 'Cries manly Canadian tears"
- MH15 6y agoAs an American, the first time I rode a train was in Canada.
- whazor 6y agoIn a busy train, where everyone is video calling or watching Netflix. Is 1.2gbit enough?
- RajuVarghese 6y agoHas anyone noticed that the comments here are only tangential to the topic of the heading, ie "stable internet on moving trains". Most are on the trains and the country where the trains are located. Not complaining; just my observation.
- Rompect 6y agoVery uplifting considering that I achieve 16mbit/s.
- 867-5309 6y ago> stream videos, play online games or work in virtual offices. This requires a great deal of bandwidth only the first might if someone were streaming 8K video with 7.1 lossless audio, which wouldn't even come close to 1.2Gbps, but on a mobile device on public transport? no I'm pretty certain 1.2Gbps would serve an entire train 720p video with 128kbps stereo audio, which for 99.9% of people would be adequate for a mobile device on public transport it's a bit like breaking the land speed record, a bit pointless and you'll never get (nor need) to be the driver
- SturgeonsLaw 6y agoFor today's usage sure, but as an infra guy I like seeing the tech that will be needed for the next decade's capacity rolled out today