Wednesday, April 01, 2009

MBTA wi-fi up and running on Rockport line

Last year, I wrote about the MBTA's pilot to offer wi-fi service on their trains... Today I got to try it out for the first time! The connection speed was similar to DSL speeds and performed pretty well until my laptop battery died about half-way through the trip. If the service proves popular among commuters, and I think it will -- there is a chance that service could be degraded to the point where I would be better off using my tethered cell-phone over bluetooth, but I welcome this change and applaud the MBTA for offering this service and adding another reason to the list of why it is smart to commute to work on the train. This summer if I'm lucky I'll be able to take an earlier train home, and get a bit more work done in time to enjoy a few hours of daylight on the beach :)

1 comment:

g michael amante said...

Doing some speed tests last night, I think the MBTA wifi may have software which throttles your download speeds. For instance, when downloading a file -- you see the rate decrease as the file gets downloaded. This would make sense to prevent people from downloading the whole train ride and taking up the shared resources bandwidth -- but at the same time it is a bit annoying when using the service. Anyone else experiencing this?