For a while now I’ve been meaning to do a blog post about East Coast trains – and what the other rail operators could learn from them.
From the point of view of a passenger who travels by rail a lot, I’ve experienced many of the different operators and, given a choice of service, will go for East Coast every time.
It’s not just for the free wifi. But that was a big factor and now today, they’ve announced it’s demise.
An email to subscribers sent this morning explains:
“Following passenger feedback about our on-board Wi-Fi you’ll be pleased to know that, from early October, we’re introducing a new and improved service across all of our trains. The upgraded Wi-Fi system will be more reliable and you’ll be able to enjoy better upload and download speeds.
“To help us to deliver the best possible Wi-Fi service, we’re introducing a payment system for Standard Class passengers. The first 15 minutes of use is free, but if you need longer you’ll pay £4.95 for 60 minutes or £9.95 for a full 24 hours. More information about the payment system can be found here.
“First Class passengers will continue to receive the service free of charge. We hope you enjoy using the new Wi-Fi system next time you travel.”
So for someone like me who travels to London, Leeds and Edinburgh on a regular basis (and there does appear to be plenty of us), that’s effectively a hike of £5-10 per journey.
Only it isn’t, because the economics don’t stack up – a mifi will be the cheaper option – so the net result will be no extra revenue for East Coast and the loss of one of the reasons to choose its services over another.
I shall drop the company an email to ask them to reconsider as well as flagging the issue on Twitter – do let me know if you’re also concerned.
Dim Sum Digital 
I expected other operators like Virgin Rail to follow East Coast’s sensible free wi-fi offering. Instead East Coast take a step back towards the dark ages. Like you, there will be no extra revenue from me because I’ll use other options. And with standard class tickets often very expensive, it’s particularly galling to read: “First Class passengers will continue to receive the service free of charge.” Free wifi is a real incentive to travel by train and great PR, painting East Coast as a go-ahead switched on 21st century company. How many people do they think will pay £4.95 for 60 minutes or £9.95 for 24 hours? Are they still using Ask Jeeves to get the answer?
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I agree Ian, a real incentive which is why I’ve always booked with them even on routes with a choice such as x country which runs into Edinburgh but offers a very poor customer experience. Had hoped other operators might aspire to be more like East Coast.
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i can’t believe the outcry over having to pay for wifi do you realise some passengers are only paying £7.50 for there train tickets, why don’t you get mobile broadband you can get that from only £10 a month and it’s more reliable. most passengers just want a train that runs on time and a seat. trains these days are like a bloody mobile office, i think some people out there really need to get a life can you not live without the internet for a few hours?
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Lucky them! For those of us who pay nearly £200 a time to travel it feels a little different. Also it depends what sort of work you do whether internet is vital – I’m not there doing the Tesco shop. For me, and many others that’s the case and yes, the train is a mobile office for us. When six of a day’s working hours are spent on a train, how else could that be?
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Yes, I got that email this morning. The “you’ll be pleased to know” bit showed touching optimism, I thought. On the other hand, the in-train free wifi has been getting worse and worse as more people with more devices connect to it. A year or two ago they added a paragraph to the login page asking people to show consideration for other passengers by not downloading big files and streaming video, which I was an interesting approach. Trouble is, the social controls are not well established. At the all-you-can-eat buffet you can see who’s piling their plate sky high, but the bandwidth hog feasts in private. I’m willing to give this new regime a chance. I’d prefer a reliable connection for 15 minutes rather than a patchy one that takes all the way to Grantham to do anything at all.
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Hope it works out for you – let me know how you get on. Personally I’m not prepared to pay the £10 extra which will be necessary to try it when mifi is both reliable and cheaper. It will be interesting to see how many people will pay. I’d guess it will just end up being a 1st class perk.
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“You’ll be pleased to know you can stroke the chickens and goats now that 3rd Class is reintroduced” … no doubt coming soon in new-austerity UK!
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Well – what can I say. First started commuting when it was GNER – cracking service but no WiFi unless you paid so I didn’t bother. Then NXEC came along and made it free. Worked well for a while until all and sundry logged on and then the maintenance of the system was cut. It was, however, still useable.
Finally we get EC and it gets even worse, they roll out upgrades (provided by a Swedish company so everything seems to link to Swedish data when it falls over) and then it is worse than useless. In a 1 hour commute I have to reconnect to the service, on average, 6 times. Now they want us to pay for the priviledge of getting a service that only provides a connection for about 60% of the time and is so slow it makes dial up look like broadband – I suggest they should try living in the real world – oh, sorry, they think they are and they’ve applied to retain the franchise until 2015.
I’ll now dust off my back up dongle and it will be my primary wifi source – £15 a month rather than £10 a day.
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I say again if internet is so important to you when you are travelling then get mobile broadband it’s not expensive and far more reliable than the wifi on the train, on the odd occasion that i did use the wifi on the train i found it garbage, very slow and kept cutting out. however i would agree that what they are charging to use the wifi is ridiculous. PLEASE REMEMBER THAT EAST COAST IS A NATIONALISED RAIL COMPANY RUN BY OUR GOVERMENT!
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The fact it’s nationalised is one of the reasons I want to see it succeed. Giving people reasons to use it over the other money-grabbing operators would seem to be one of those ways it can differentiate. East Coast already offers better catering and good signage on it’s services, let’s hope those advantages don’t follow suite.
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Actually the wifi on the train always used to be far more reliable than a 3G connection- multiple providers, external ariels, and the satellite backup are all things a mobile broadband modem cannot do.
If there was a real issue with bandwidth hogs it wouldn’t have been hard to deal with that at a technical (filtering) level.
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East Coast WiFi today – well!
25 minutes to log in and get the page confirming you are connected by which time your 15 free minutes have expired – it is a complete and utter joke!
Whilst talking about the WiFi the map on the WiFi landing page has re-drawn British geography as Doncaster is located near to Crawley and Newark on Trent has been moved to the north London suburbs.
As for catering – just under £2 for a very indifferent cup of coffee or tea that is more like dishwater – no it isn’t good nor is it reasonable. £3.50 for a bacon sandwich is expensive as is 90p for a packet of crisps, although £4.50 for a hot meal is, admittedly, not bad. £10 for Continental breakfast is taking the mickey.
There is nothing to mark out East Coast as being any better than the rest – in fact their time keeping is the worst in the country, staff are generally indifferent to travellers (granted there are some that do care) and their admin is lousy. Promised contact just doesn’t happen, e-mails and letters are ignored. Whilst talking about timekeeping they will blame Network Rail for the problems – well some of it comes back to them as they need to maintain their trains so as to cause no damage to the infrastructure – NXEC got caught out by this and it looks as if EC are going down the same route again within 2 years of the first attempt at reducing rolling stock maintenance. Not sensible and very, very costly when compensation to Network Rail and other TOC’s is taken into account.
The trains are filthy, it is now quite common to have to scrape the hair gel, grease and nits off the inside of the windows in order to be able to see out of them, the seats quite often look as if they have been used as doormats at Glastonbury Festival and the tables are usually so sticky that anything put on them is there for the duration. It wasn’t quite as bad with NXEC in charge and such things were extremely rare with GNER.
Anyone that thinks EC are good at running trains or providing customer service wants their head examining. They might seem OK for the occasional traveller but when commuting daily you soon get to know how bad they really are.
I wonder – will they start charging for seat reservations next – oh, they stopped that about a year ago, time to start it up again ………
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I recall when GNER operated the service Wi-Fi was free in First class and in Standard class you had to pay. National Express made it free for all when they took over. This had the effect of overburdening the system making it next to useless.
For somebody who books months in advance to get cheap First class travel I look forward to the charge in standard class. This will maintain a decent standard of Wi-Fi
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I travel regularly between Edinburgh and London/Cambridge. One of the main reasons I use the EC line rather than fly is that I can work on the journey. I had to pay £9.95 for WiFi the other day, poor value as it’s not much improved. Looks like EasyJet will get more of my business in future.
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I really valued the free wifi -Edinburgh to London and back is over 10 hours.
I contacted East Coast about it and they said that they’d invested £500,000 to upgrade the wifi so that it works better and that the fees are to recuperate costs.
How can we persuade them that they will use valuable passengers – the sort of business passengers who need to book tickets a couple of days before travel and so pay much more -rather than get their money back through folk paying for wifi or upgrading to 1st class?
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