Signal failure

Like many Brits, my working day starts and ends with a trip on the train. Last year we made over 1.7 billion railway journeys—the highest figure by far since the Covid pandemic.

Those who frequent the railway will be well acquainted with the litany of gripes that plague the daily commute. The delays, cancellations, and broken toilets. Or indeed the growing problem of the “headphone dodgers” who turn the train carriage into a rolling dance-club. One thing is for sure: not a day passes without something going wrong.

Yet the problem that frustrates me most is one almost every passenger shares — and one that could be solved far more easily than you might think. The culprit is Wi-Fi, or rather, the lack of it.

Last week, it was announced that ministers were intending to introduce satellite internet connectivity across more than 1,400 main line trains, promising to lift Wi-Fi availability from a measly 50% of journeys to a far more respectable 90%. By the dire standards of British rail policy, this is a piece of good news.

The time we spend on trains is rising — up 17% last year alone. Regular travellers are faced with an increasingly important quandary. Just what to do on the train? Some read, some sleep, and some game. But for many, the rise of online working presents an opportunity to cram in a few extra hours before starting a day in the office.

This is my attitude. Yet my plans are often dashed by patchy service: PDF files that won’t open, an email account that fails to send and receive, and word documents that take 10 minutes to load all remain features of my weekday mornings.

Yet finally, a solution is arriving over the brow of the hill. Its name: Starlink. A technology already used in settings ranging from the battlefields of Ukraine to living rooms across Britain, it presents a fast, resilient, and importantly portable internet service. Six trains in Scotland were fitted with the devices last year in trials conducted by ScotRail. Results from South Western Railway showed connectivity of 97% even through the New Forest — one of the worst areas in Britain for cellular signal. This technology works. Indeed, it has worked for some time.

This begs the rather obvious question: why did it take so long?

This begs the rather obvious question: why did it take so long? The government is set to commit £57 million to the rollout. That is obviously welcome. But it is important to consider what we have lost in the meantime. Oxford economist Dr Daniel Susskind has calculated that, using the government’s own HS2 business case assumptions, poor train Wi-Fi costs the British economy over £375 million per year in lost productivity.

Based on these numbers, the return on investment for fixing it could be as high as 50:1. Contrast that with HS2, where the return on investment was estimated at between £2 and £2.50 for every pound invested. Yet we have spent the best part of a decade, and nearly £50 billion on the latter, and are only just beginning to think about getting around to unlocking the value of the former.

The contrast between the projects is hard to overstate. HS2 used to be billed as a once in a generation project. The sort of grand and transformative initiative that politicians so often find irresistible. Satellite Wi-Fi is, by comparison, somewhat less glamorous. There is no “ribbon cutting moment”, no photos of construction workers laying down kilometres of shiny new track, and a distinct lack of ‘buzz’ from journalists and Westminster-watchers across the country. Yet for the millions nationwide who get onto a train with the hope of getting something done, it may be the more transformative of the two by some distance.

For passengers, the cost of establishing this system in its first year would add roughly 3p to the cost of a train journey. When compared to the £29 an average taxpayer pays annually to the failed HS2 project, that seems like very good value for money indeed. In fact, one might be so bold as to call it a bargain.

The government deserves credit for finally acting: with emphasis on finally. The lesson here should not be that ministers have been bold, but that ministers of all political stripes have been slow to act. For too long, HS2, a project begun with noble intentions, seems to have held the DfT in a vice-like grip. Sensible, affordable and practical policies have been left to roll off the tracks, and ordinary travellers have paid the price.

Of course, digital infrastructure projects don’t lay new tracks or alleviate chronic capacity issues. But importantly, small, achievable projects do deliver ‘something’—which is more than can be said for HS2. So the next time a minister stands up to defend a multi-billion-pound vanity project that they say is “transformative”, perhaps the operative question is: “have you fixed the Wi-Fi yet?”