Mittnabotåget - now with free internet access onboard
Veolia Transport operates Mittnabotåget that services 31 stations between Sundsvall-Östersund-Trondheim. The largest passenger groups are commuters and teenagers. The trains are of model Regina and every year about 320.000 trips are made with Mittnabotåget.
Mittnabotåget puts a lot of effort into improving the service onboard. The trains are equipped with a café and they have a power outlet next to each seat, which makes it easy to use a laptop or re-charge a mobile phone. Now (December 2008), the passengers even has access to internet - free of charge.
When a passenger starts its laptop the browser will automatically be redirected to a web portal where he or she can login on internet. Thereafter, internet can be used throughout the whole trip free of charge.
Every passenger can use up to 200 MB data per month without charge, which roughly corresponds to 1000-emails or visiting a news-site 100 times. If the passenger wish to use internet more, he or she needs to purchase a digital surfcard which is done via the web-portal. Having an upper limit on the usage is important since the internet back-hauling is shared amongst all passengers. Without upper limit some won't bother to close bandwidth hungry applications, like file-sharing programs, that may run in the background.
Veolia has seen a steady growth in both the number of users and the number of times a user accesses internet onboard. The internet service has proven itself both in robustness and capacity, and the users are very satisfied.
"We definitely think that this type of service should be free of charge and we believe that the free internet service will attract more customers to Mittnabotget", says Katarina Persson, head of operations on Veolia Transport.
Oxyfi is the main supplier to Veolia and delivers the system and services for web portal, passenger provisioning, monitoring and statistics while the mobile internet is supplied by Ice.net.