All Aboard for Canadian Wi-Fi
Lots of articles showing up today about how a few Canadian trains will be offering wireless connectivity on a few routes. The description in this article makes the process sound insanely complex (and thus, less likely to work well). It might not be the most accurate, but they’re suggesting that internet connections will reach the train’s central system via a satellite connection, and then will make use of WiFi to reach a traveler’s laptop. From there, the outgoing traffic will WiFi back to the train’s central system, where it will use a 1x connection to send the data back out. Let’s see… that would mean they’re using satellite, WiFi, and cellular (1x) networks all for the same connection. That’s likely to work flawlessly. Also, maybe the article is wrong, but why would they use one technology for downloading (satellite) and one for uploading (cellular)?
