Eirepreneur writes With no plans for wireless internet service is Irish Rail really “getting there”?
…getting back to the issue of onboard broadband Will Knott believes Irish Rail are missing the opportunity to make a lot of money, “and the mobile carriers are missing out by leaving ‘coverage holes’ on the route.”. Conor O’Neill has been documenting those coverage holes on both the O2 and Vodafone networks and while O2 is the winner of his tests it’s clear that neither option is satisfactory.
Frankly, I do not believe for a second this is an opportunity to make a lot of money. While it may be convenient for those of us who do jump on the train and need to work for the 2 hours from Belfast to Dublin or the 3-4 hours from Dublin to Cork, it’s not going to be an earner.
Why?
Without some sort of mesh network, with a node every 100 m or so, protected from the hooligans and yobs on the way, there’s no way to ensure a connection the whole way. And it’s the yobs and hooligans who ruin it really.
IrishBroadband’s wireless broadband would seem to me to be the most obvious contender against the 3G networks of the carriers but then again, there’s no sense of competition there. If a 3G carrier could offer me broadband using a dongle with some reliability, I’d not use a landline based broadband!
The 3G network USB dongles available from most phone carriers would seem to be the cheapest way to go though when I tested one the other day, I got speeds that I would expect from GPRS which did not enamor me of their services: in fact, my iPhone was able to render pages faster than a dual-core laptop on 3G from Three (in a Three store). That’s pretty crap.
Anyone seen good speeds on a 3G network dongle?