{"id":16473,"date":"2015-08-24T12:53:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-24T11:53:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/?p=16473"},"modified":"2015-08-24T12:53:55","modified_gmt":"2015-08-24T11:53:55","slug":"first-great-western-free-train-wi-fi-slower-than-a-valium-infused-sloth-at-bedtime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/first-great-western-free-train-wi-fi-slower-than-a-valium-infused-sloth-at-bedtime\/","title":{"rendered":"First Great Western free train Wi-Fi: slower than a valium infused sloth at bedtime"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"First<\/p>\n

I thought I’d share the moan I registered on the urban75 boards<\/a>\u00a0about the useless wi-fi service I encountered on my journey up to Cardiff last week.<\/p>\n

On my trip up from London I noticed that First Great Western (FGW) was now offering free in-train, wi-fi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"First<\/p>\n

“Great,” I thought, “I can get some work done on the move and not have to rely on my phone’s signal.”<\/p>\n

So I quickly connected, went through the compulsory registration bit via\u00a0my web browser and then waited to bask in the high speed wi-fi glory of the move.<\/p>\n

And then I waited. And waited.\u00a0And then realised that the connection is\u00a0so slow that it’s actually pointless.<\/p>\n

Basic, text-only web pages would take so long to download that a 1200 bit\/s modem from the 90s\u00a0would look like the devil’s work in speed compared to what\u00a0was available on the train.<\/p>\n

I tried reconnecting several times, but the connection remained almost comically bad. I eventually gave up and went back to\u00a0using my mobile as a hot spot.<\/p>\n

Naturally, First Great Western’s web page<\/a> about the service is plastered in caveats:<\/p>\n

Public WiFi bandwidth is shared and this means speeds aren\u2019t always the same – i.e. on busier trains, you might find the service is slower than on quieter trains.<\/p>\n

To make sure everyone has the best experience possible we also operate a fair use policy which will reduce the speed of your connection if you download more than 10MB a journey.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Now, I’m all for a fair use policy when we’re talking about a free service, but I think I’d need to be on a FGW slow trip to the Moon before I’d get anywhere near using up 10MBs worth of\u00a0data.<\/p>\n

The service is so bad, they’d be better off giving up on it until they can actually offer something that works to a reasonable degree,\u00a0as right now all it does is frustrate and annoy passengers (sorry, customers<\/em>) – especially ones like me who had forked out 93-chuffing-quid for the return trip.<\/p>\n

Sort it out please, FGW.<\/p>\n

What do you think about the service?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Add your comments below, or join in with the chat on the urban75 forums<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I’d share the moan I registered on the urban75 boards\u00a0about the useless wi-fi service I encountered on my journey up to Cardiff last week. On my trip up … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":16474,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[90],"tags":[1217,870,1200,483,1218],"class_list":["post-16473","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-railways","tag-first-great-western","tag-railway","tag-railways","tag-wi-fi","tag-wifi"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/08\/first-great-western-wifi.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pQI7P-4hH","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16473","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16473"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16473\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16477,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16473\/revisions\/16477"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16474"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16473"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16473"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.urban75.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16473"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}