pathetic piss kitten (@kitten)

Spanish cell carriers rambling

some years ago, Renfe announced a partnership with Telefónica to offer free wifi in their AVE trains, putting 4G (and now 5G I assume) antennas in the trains

it sounds cool, doesn't it? well, they didn't spare a single minute in thinking about keeping that working while in a tunnel. it works perfectly overground, but the second the train enters a tunnel, internet is gone

in Barcelona, the only H.S. track crossing the city (so, the one essentially every single AVE train in the city goes through) has absolutely zero cell reception, not even for the train modems.

there has to be a way of forcing carriers to actually ensure proper service, it's 2025, on a technical level this is a solved problem. they clearly just don't care and have realized they can get away with it, free market competition obviously didn't work either because no carrier has reception. either that, or is ADIF blocking the installation of that infrastructure? but why would they?

Spanish cell carriers rambling

@kitten hell we have 5G on the tube in London. It's absolutely possible.

Spanish cell carriers rambling

@mindpersephone yes!! in Madrid and Barcelona too in the subway. in Madrid they even did an awful marketing campaign where they renamed line 2, the red one, to "line 2 Vodafone" (including changing the PA announcements, it was awful), but it at least had the value prop of installing 4G coverage across all that line, which was nice

re: Spanish cell carriers rambling

@kitten @mindpersephone that required collaboration between TfL, an infrastructure company and the networks though, because all the networks need to share one leaky feeder and a lot of the infrastructure is in common