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by jillesvangurp 1153 days ago
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.
2 comments
cyberpunk 1153 days ago
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.

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jillesvangurp 1152 days ago
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.

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locallost 1152 days ago
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.
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