CONSTRUCTION & STATIONS
Online on the platform S
Free wi-fi has been a perk confined mostly to first class passengers up until now. But in Scotland, thanks to some government funding, passengers on board trains and at stations are getting online without paying a penny. RTM heard from ScotRail’s head of IT, Alan Manclark, as well as Tim Passingham and James Hughes from Level 3 Communications, the technology company implementing free wi-fi at stations.
cotRail is installing free wi-fi at 25 stations, thanks to funding from the Scottish government via Transport Scotland.
This latest project is on top of the existing scheme to offer wi-fi on the operator’s 59 Class 170s, already rolled out, and on its 38 Class 380s, which goes live soon.
When RTM talked to ScotRail, the station implementation was nearly complete, having gone live at 20 out of 25 stations.
ScotRail’s head of IT Alan Manclark told RTM: “We know that customers increasingly expect to stay connected while travelling – with more than a quarter of a million wi-fi users on our express trains each month – so it’s exciting to have free wi-fi at our stations for the first time. We are confident customers will find it useful, whether they are keeping up with work emails, or simply checking in with friends.”
ScotRail led the delivery of stations wi-fi, but regularly consulted with and reported to Transport Scotland, which provided £250,000 for the project.
Manclark said: “Several factors were
considered when selecting the first tranche of stations to receive wi-fi, including footfall, how long people stay on the premises, the number of services and the impact of major events, such as the Commonwealth Games and Ryder Cup.
“We also aimed to support stations that provide 110 | rail technology magazine Feb/Mar 14
onward travel links. There are plans for further stations to receive wi-fi in future as part of the Scottish government’s aim to roll out wi-fi across Scotland’s railways.”
He said the roll-out on the Class 170s showed “the huge demand for wi-fi during rail journeys”, adding: “We have been careful to communicate to customers that on-train wi-fi needs to collate the best available signal from many mobile providers, and we have asked them not to access heavy bandwidth sites.
“With station wi-fi, we are glad to have much more available bandwidth due to using fixed connections – so customers will be able to stream videos from sites such as YouTube and BBC iPlayer.”
ScotRail went out to tender for the project in early 2013. It chose to go with Level 3 Communications, which already provides the corporate network for FirstGroup (and many other rail companies).
James Hughes, director of the travel, transport and logistics sector for the IT company, told RTM: “Level 3 hadn’t actually developed the station wi-fi solution at that time. We’d been working on an on-board solution for some time. We thought stations looked like a very logical place to go next.
“We came up with a very interesting solution, took that to ScotRail and were very open that this was the first time we’d looked at stations.
We were competing against some of the well- known current wi-fi providers at stations and airports, but because of the compelling benefits of combining the wi-fi with the corporate network, ScotRail liked that vision and where it could take their business, and they gave it to Level 3.”
Many of the stations had not had their infrastructure upgraded in many years, Hughes said, and there were listed building issues to contend with at others. “Getting fibre into those stations was difficult,” he said.
“Also, because it was a new product for Level 3, we had to work through the business processes that sit behind it to ensure that if a help ticket gets raised, for example, how we navigate that through our operations team to make sure we can hit the SLAs.
“Some of the stations, such as Gleneagles because of the Ryder Cup in September, were going through massive refurbishments anyway. Because Transport
Scotland and
ScotRail are completely redeveloping that site, those stations will be a bit further behind in the wi-fi schedule.”
Hughes explained: “Level 3 provides the corporate IPVPN to FirstGroup, including ScotRail. They use that network for point of sale, customer information,
business
applications and so on. We’ve known for a while that the customer would like more bandwidth into their stations for operational
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