Rob's Rants

[Update: additional speedtest reslts, 7/1/2009]

Riding the Information Super Highway from Worcester to Boston

Back in 2008, the MBTA announced that it would be installing Wi-Fi connectivity on the Commuter Rail lines, starting with a pilot on the Worcester-Framingham line that I ride. Awesome — I just started commuting in September of 2008 and the pilot was already in place; full deployment to the rest of the line was scheduled to begin January 2009 and be complete by summer. Visions of a productive commute danced in my head.

Now for the reality. I’ve been riding the Worcester-Framingham line faithfully for 9 months now. Nearly from end to end. I have tried to work online in the morning and in the evening, and even at odd times during the day when I had off-peak commutes. And I can only reach one conclusion…

The W-Fi service sucks. Totally. Worse than the Compuserve dial-up access I had over a Hayes 1200 baud modem in my old Apple II in 1984.

For proof I offer the speed test I conducted today on my way home (performed between Back Bay station and West Natick):

6/19/09 Speed Test

0.12 Mb/sec (120 Kb/sec)?! That’s barely 2x 56K dial-up. And a latency of 206 ms means they must have carrier pigeons they release to make the connection.

What’s wrong with it? Well…

• Only 2 coaches (max) per train have signal. And the “signs” (stickers) are already falling off so it’s anyone’s guess whether or not a given coach has Wi-Fi.
• Even if you win the coach lottery, it seems like the antennas are mounted in terrible locations. So regardless of where I sit I am only able to capture a signal one or two commutes per week.
• What bandwidth there is is shared among all users in range so it’s often horribly oversubscribed.
• The signal drops completely at least twice per ride.

As always, your mileage may vary. Others have reported different results (on different lines), though none seem to be anything to get excited about. See The Silver Onion blog, and the At First Light blog for examples.

What’s a commuter to do? Well I purchased a Verizon Wireless broadband plan today and I’ll be testing the USB modem on Monday. Hopefully that will let me actually get online and get something done. More to come.

Update 6/24/2009

In fairness to the MBTA I decided to test the connection when I had a chance to test a late night train (the 10:20 PM Worcester local) that was barely full. That speed test yielded the following (between Back Bay & Yawkey):

Woo hoo! An entire 1.75x faster than 56K dial-up. When no one is using it. Any system where the upload speed is 2X the download speed has something wrong. Good luck. I’ll stick with Verizon.

Update

To show that I’m not intentionally trying to bias the results, I am including a couple of tests I ran on a morning train when I actually had a full wi-fi signal on the train. These were run on the morning of 7/1/09, somewhere between Westborough and Framingham:

7/1/09 Morning Test

As you can see, they’re slightly better, but nothing to write home about. To add some perspective to this, with a Verizon mobile broadband USB stick, I routinely get speeds of .61 to .72 Mbps, or three times faster. And with much less latency it just feels much better.

7/1/09 2nd Test

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Related posts:

1. Suggested MBTA Commuter Rail Improvements
2. Something That Worked on the MBTA
3. Something Else That Worked on the MBTA