On 25/10/2012 17:54, Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 12:34:13 on Thu, 25 Oct
2012, Roland Perry remarked:
I have a Virgin PAYG phone but have only managed minimal usage of the
tube wi-fi - principally because I have not had minutes to wait for a
train and my local station is not yet equipped. Trying to log on from
a train while it pauses at a station is just about impossible as the
dwelll time is too short.

What are you trying to log into? I'd hope something like a Twitter or
Facebook account could grab a useful amount of information in just a
few seconds.

I gave this the "mystery shopper" treatment at Westminster and all
stations to Kings Cross (via Victoria).

Despite claiming to be logged into the Virgin hotspots all the way at
stations, I didn't manage to send/receive any traffic at all. Not even
Skype, which usually connects itself up with a couple of seconds of
seeing connectivity.

So this initiative gets a resounding "NUL POINTS" from me (which seems
to echo your own experience).

I tried it on the way home from Baker St to Waterloo this evening. My
phone has already been set up to auto-connect to the Virgin Wi-fi and as
soon as the train pulled into Embankment I was able to connect, sign in,
and look up the platform of my mainline train from Waterloo using the
National Rail app (very handy when time is tight).

I'm sure I could've downloaded a few e-mails or sent a tweet/updated
Facebook in the same timespan.

What is annoying is that you have to go to the Virgin Media wi-fi
landing page before it'll send any other traffic, even if you were just
using the wi-fi at the next station along!

I do hope that when it goes to 'service information only', this will
still allow the various National Rail apps to use it.