My Via Experience
Tuesday: go to train station to buy a round-trip ticket to Kitchener. “Does the train have wireless?” “Let me check… yes, that train has wireless.”
Wednesday: get on the train, turn on laptop, try to connect to the Internet. 24 hours of wireless for $8.95 plus taxes sounds pretty good: I’ll have almost for hours to get some work done. Sign up, pay, log in, start catching up on mail…
15 minutes later, the train leaves the station, and the connection dies. I wait a few minutes (maybe they reboot when they switch to internal power?), but there’s nothing. “Excuse me, conductor, but I’ve having trouble with my wireless connection.” “Oh, there’s no wireless on this train, sir, we don’t have the special dish thing.” “But I specifically asked…” “Oh, you’d have to take that up with customer service, sir, there’s nothing I can do.”
Ninety minutes later: as I’m getting off the train in Kitchener, I see a big Via Rail WiFi access sign on the wall. Cool—my train back isn’t ’til 9:45 pm, so after dinner, I can hang out at the train station and catch up on some work.
Conversation and lunch (thanks, Michael #1), more conversation and a guest lecture (thanks, Paul), dinner (thanks, Michael #2), and I’m back at the train station. Turn on my laptop—nothing that calls itself Via. “Excuse me, Ms. Ticket Vendor, but I can’t get on the wireless network.” “Oh, there’s no wireless here any more, sir.” “But what about that sign?” “Oh, we haven’t been told to take it down yet.”
*sigh*
Later: Via refunded my money — apparently I’m not the first (or first thousandth 
) person to complain.
In Scandinavia we’re I’m from, we’re seeing initiatives for free wifi in trains, since it’s a great catalyst for reducing cars on the roads on top of just being a 200Km/h rapid commute.
Meanwhile, here in the greater Montreal area where I am these days, trains seems to be something that can only move containers at 20Km/h. The world is truly diverse.
My experience with Via wireless wasn’t any better.
Leaving Montreal, I paid for the service in the lounge, and had no issues.
I got onto the train, and it worked just fine in the station.
Once we started to move the service was completely unusable. They did wireless on the train, but no one in my car was able to get an actual connection that was usable.
I called their customer support and they told me they’d cancel the order and I should buy it again….I did…with no luck.
I saw a few other people with laptops and I went around asking them if they were having any luck, and everyone was just pretty frustrated.
I wasted a few hours trying to use it, just when it would work a little bit, it would kick me off. I finally called to cancel it and just give up. It was canceled, my money was refunded, and suddenly it was working with more reliability than it was when I had paid for it.
The customer support was at least easy to deal with, but the whole experience makes me just not believe their claims of wifi on the train.
When I took the via last time they had onboard wireless, but when you connected to it nothing worked: the wireless network wasn’t connected to the outside world.
Thankfully I didn’t pay for it, because I couldn’t, there wasn’t any captive portal type thing either. But my experience wasn’t very pleasant.
At least they have power on the train, so I could work on my laptop offline for a long time, which puts it one notch above a greyhound (other than the distinct lack of decapitations).
You probably were picking up a signal from a different train that actually had wifi. I’ve seen the network even while waiting at Union on a GO train.
So much for the “the world is flat”, and welcome, Dr.Florida’s “spikes”
(well, 8.95+tax, this much)
I share your frustration. It sucks to be promised something, *pay* for it, and then get basically nothing.
But I couldn’t help but be reminded of Louis CK’s appearance on Conan recently. “Everything’s amazing, no one’s happy”: http://tinyurl.com/6buoaq
“You’re sitting in a chair…in the SKY!”
If I recall correctly, Via was an early adopter of mobile WiFi Internet access. For that reason the network is old, insecure, and extremely slow — it’s 802.11b only, a well thought out MAC address change can get you free access, and the latency in ms can be five figures with 50% packet loss.
I used to take the train to Montreal to visit Kate every weekend and it Just Wasn’t Worth It.