The Wi-Fi on trains is awful – and that’s how it should stay
Following the announcement of whizzy infrastructure plans to solidify the UK’s god-awful train wifi coverage once and for all, long-suffering commuters are breathing a collective sigh of relief. Rightly so – is there anything more infuriating than finding yourself hamstrung by patchy internet at just the moment when a crucial email needs sending, document uploading, call making?
On the other hand: is there anything more delicious than explaining “sorry, I’m on a train”, throwing your hands up, and surrendering to the mini digital detox – not just a precious reprieve, but one of the last remaining in our era of hyper-connectivity?
I guess it was only a matter of time; given the ubiquity of internet coverage today, trains (and planes — also suddenly wifi-ed to the nines) have long represented a weird blip in digital supremacy. Increasingly, we expect to be able to reach anyone, anywhere in the world, at any time – and while that’s certainly convenient, it’s also exhausting. Once, the question was where you could get internet access; now, it’s where you’re free from it.
Travelling used to entail stepping out of normal life – its conveniences, sure, but its obligations too; and with messages and apps otherwise pinging 24/7, the enforced tech-limbo of a train ride or flight became more novel than ever. With hours stretching ahead, people were driven to means of diverting themselves that they’d never normally bother with: downloading specific films, reading a book, or just daydreaming. Well, that’s the end of that – no, really.
When I was 11, the only way for me to message my friends was on MSN, which was tethered to the family computer in our sitting room. God knows I would have loved to take those prickly little exchanges to my room, swapping notes about Avril Lavigne or agonising about crushes until the wee small hours; yet, I’m so grateful that I couldn’t.
As a kid, I had no option but to log off – and that’s the real issue.
Call me a cynic, but given a choice between internet access – instant gratification, social connectivity – and analogue-anything, humans simply cannot be trusted to reliably take the latter. Gazing out of the window might be peaceful and restorative, but it’s dull and solitary, and we’re just not wired for that if we can help it. What’s more, if our pleasure-seeking instincts weren’t enough to contend with, social pressure will make the newly minted coverage even more impossible to opt out of. Of course, wifi on trains comes with no obligation to use it – but cultural expectations are even harder to resist than technological innovation.
With our work and social lives carried around in our pockets on smartphones, today the only excuse for being offline is being unable to get on; otherwise, good luck justifying ignoring your friend’s WhatsApp or your boss’s “urgent” message. As such, while the rollout might make sending an ad-hoc email easier, we’ll be losing as well as gaining – specifically, the mandated timeout that our fried little lizard brains need, even if it’s the last thing they want.
Like so many toddlers faced with the option of fruit or ice cream for dessert, we’re just not equipped to choose what’s good for us. And as technology catches up to our expectations of instant and eternal connectivity, we’ll have infinite (digital) sundaes at our disposal – gee, wonder whether we’ll eat them? You already know the answer.
While the distinction between life off- and online was once crystal clear (agonisingly so, for tween me), today it is increasingly smudgy; innovations like this one threaten to erase it altogether. But necessity is the mother of invention; deprived of the hitherto-ironclad excuse for dropping out for a couple of hours, those hankering for a break will just have to get more creative: sorry, can’t talk, I’ve fallen down a well and signal’s ghastly.
