With free Wi-Fi becoming the expected standard in cafes, stations, airports and even city buses nearly everywhere, it's something of a surprise when a prize-winning railroad says no to requests for it.
That's the case for the Swiss rail system, recently named as Europe's best, and the cost of providing it turns out to be the reason. Trains, like planes and other moving vehicles, must wirelessly receive a signal with enough bandwidth and then use it for a Wi-Fi network for passengers—and the cost to get that signal to the moving vehicle is determined by the signal provider.
The cost is much lower for a fixed location like an airport: it gets the signal the way we all do, from a fixed wire or cable connection; the rest of the cost is in putting sufficient signal repeaters around the building. While it's not free, it's a lot less costly than beaming the signal over great distances.
In the air, that's been a profitable market for signal providers such as GoGo in their aircraft field, and there is little unrestricted free Wi-Fi on planes. Rail carriers have found much more resistance to paid schemes, in part because many passengers are able to use their mobile phone accounts on-board.
Swiss Railways has assumed that the vast majority of the market either have unlimited data plans, or would do without, rather than having the railroad raise ticket prices in general to cover its costs for more coverage.
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