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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

The problem is that in Germany, the city-to-city trains that can be used with this ticket do not have WIFI IIRC. Can anybody confirm this?

Traveling time without WIFI is a much higher burden to me than normal traveling time, where I can work on my projects. I actually like working on the train. It is a nice environment. But without that possibility, long train rides are a chore to me.

And it will be interesting to see how crowded the trains will be.

Durig the 9-Euro ticket times, city-to-city trains were uncomfortably densely packed.

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And also the inner city transport - at least in hamburg. Which is a great datapoint I think. Because this was true for all three months if I recall correctly and it means that there is absolutely a lot of public demand for inexpensive/free ways to travel. I work in an area with a lot of publicly subsidised housing which hosts mostly families that are less well off and I sometimes get to talk to these people and what I hear time and time again is how they had trouble paying for public transport and so they put off doctors appointments, can't have their child join a soccer team because they would need a monthly ticket to get to the field or have to compromise on other parts of their life that are completely non-negociable for many others. So there are many higher order effects where making public transport financially accessible to everyone could have positive benefits for financially underpriviledged people. Also higher public transport usage might lead to less cars and hence less polution, less road damage that needs repair and less crashes and accidents so there might also be other positive effects downstream. I would be interested in a full economic breakdown of this, although that might be hard or infeasible to do. Yet I would not be suprised if it turned out quite positive for most.

The possibility to go long distance on trains meant for commuters is an unfortunate side effect of the ticket, more tolerated than intended.

The big improvement is that the ticket you buy for your home town now also works in cities you visit, no more figuring out a different byzantine price model each time you book a hotel.

Imagine vehicle tax would only permit to drive on the roads of your home town and going elsewhere would require you to register locally. Until yesterday, that was exactly how public transit worked.

Just use mobile data? That's what the trains are using anyway.

In my experience, the mobile connection is very flaky on the trains in Germany.

I would think the train can have a much more powerful antenna to talk to mobile towers and then relay that to the passangers. So that WIFI is better than mobile data.

In my experience network coverage in Germany is way below must other European countries I have visited. Some with a much lower inhabitant desisty like Finland.

Apparently data reception in German trains is very low.

This report[0] says it's 62-78% nationwide. Of the neighbouring alps countries Austria is 78-88% and Switzerland is 93-96%.

[0]: https://www.umlaut.com/uploads/documents/Reports-Certificate...

From my limited experience on the German rails (Amsterdam - Berlin 5/6 times in the last 4 years) the mobile 4G/5G connection was pretty good. Only dropping off when travelling through very remote rural areas. In the Netherlands we have unlimited data subscriptions, I assume Germany has something similar? That should be enough to get some work done in the train :)

Unlimited data here is rare (or too expensive), usually normal people have 5-10gb a month. Still it covers most web and messaged stuff, just don’t watch too much video….

To be a little more precise about the pricing:

O2 Unlimited:

- 32,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 3mbit with unlimited data

- 42,99€/month for 4G/5G capped at 15mbit with unlimited data

- 62,99€/month for 4G/5G up to 500mbit with with unlimited data

Vodafone:

- 79,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimted data

Telekom:

- 84,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data

1und1:

- 49,99€/month with 4G/5G capped at 10mbit with unlimited data

- 69,99€/month with 4G/5G up to 500mbit with unlimited data

Freenet Funk is offering unlimited data with 4G for 0.99€/day. Speeds are up to 250mbit.

> From my limited experience on the German rails (Amsterdam - Berlin 5/6 times in the last 4 years) the mobile 4G/5G connection was pretty good. Only dropping off when travelling through very remote rural areas.

Not sure what you'd call "very remote rural areas", but when on the main rail lines through Bavaria (Munich-Rosenheim-Salzburg-Vienna and -Rosenheim-Innsbruck-Verona) if you're in the countryside you'll often experience patchy or zero mobile coverage, never mind 4G/5G.

With 5G speeds and unlimited data* - do you even need WiFi? Not to mention most companies nowadays have clear policies of (not) connecting to free public wifi's or even working in public spaces where your screen may be visible.

* Usually the first 50gb is max speed and then it drops to 25/25 etc - which is still really fast.

Because network coverage in Germany is pretty bad, so you are mostly out of reach from networks when traveling by train. It's gotten better over the years since I moved here. But I'm basically still offline 80% of the journey between Berlin and my parents place in the Netherlands. As soon as you cross the border into NL, it's fine. It's a German issue. You have this effect on all its borders. You travel to the border, you are basically offline. As soon as you cross it into Poland, France, Denmark, etc. it's suddenly fine.

Of course train wifi on intercities has the same issues since it relies on the same infrastructure. Even when it works, it tends to be a pretty poor experience and the network is low speed, over subscribed, etc.

What network are you with? This doesn't match my experience -- I've traveled around 35,000km on trains inside Germany in the last few years, and apart from one 5 minute section just outside of Berlin when going SE dresden, I've pretty much always had a full signal.

YMMV I guess. But I just wanted to say that I don't think this is completely accurate.

O2. I never have a full signal outside of cities. I've seen the coverage metrics as well that back that up. Here's a pretty good resource for that:

https://www.nperf.com/en/map/DE/-/187893.O2-Mobile/signal/?l...

The track between Berlin, Hannover, Osnabruck is particularly bad. You get some connectivity near those cities but most of the way my phone is useless.

Telekom is better but they too have issues in the country side. I also encounter this issue professionally with our customers as we sell a SAAS app that our customers have to use on site and a disturbingly large number of our customers have either very poor or no connectivity as they tend to be on the edges of cities or in the middle of nowhere. Which in Germany means forget about 5G and hope for the best with a 3G/4G connection with one or two bars if you are standing next to a window. It's a specifically German problem, other countries in the EU have more modern infrastructure.

I travel long distance exclusively by train and can't really confirm. Sure there might be an issue here and there, but overall it's fine. Maybe if you want to watch a very bandwidth intensive video, but I don't know if that's realistic.

> Not to mention most companies nowadays have clear policies of (not) connecting to free public wifi's or even working in public spaces where your screen may be visible.

Why is that? Would a VPN not make it safe against most threat models? I mean assuming you are not working at a place where government actors are trying to target you specifically.

Or can they inject something to force the VPN to disable and hope non-encrypted data gets transmitted?

I think it’s to be taken at face value — they don’t want unauthorised people seeing what’s on screen.

A bigger issue than WIFI is the spotty cell coverage.

Mobile data usually works fine in German regional trains. But if you want trips longer than 2 hours, you probably want the higher speed trains anyway (which now might have less annoying poor people in them) What’s more annoying is that the price - in regions without good public transportation it’s actually too expensive, but it’s a nice gift to big city dwellers.

It's actually not half as bad for rural residents as it is usually presented by car addicts: for those amongst rural residents who would be interested in making their cumbersome trips using public transit, subscription in conventional price models were usually prohibitively expensive. They basically took distance based single ticket price, scaled by "what if it was used for the full trip five days a week?" and applied some discount. They were offered bad service at high price. In some places 10x the price a city dweller would have to pay for their short range subscription. Sure, many out there won't buy it even at the lower price, but for those who do is a much bigger improvement over the status quo than for a city dweller. For many city dwellers, it will in fact be nothing more than an upsell option to the ticket they already have, pay more (in some places twice as much) for a ticket that will also be valid for the occasional trip out of town.

> annoying poor people

> annoying is that the price ... too expensive

>.>

ICEs and some regional trains do have wifi, but it can be quite slow and unreliable. Good enough for the occasional git push though ;)

At least in Baden-Württemberg, most regional trains (and even some busses) I've used so far have WLAN nowadays.

Even if there was WiFi available on the train, the mobile network outside large population centres is so terrible, you wouldn't be able to get much done. Train WiFi is not magical, it needs proper infrastructure all over the place.

Not sure why you get downvoted, lack of wifi in German trains is an issue, unreliable mobile internet coverage is another.

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