During the past couple of Thalys train trips from Cologne to Paris I just ignored the “we have Wi-Fi Internet access on board” announcements since it just didn't work anymore even though at the beginning they had a brilliant start. Whenever I tried there was just no connectivity at all except for the landing screen. But they keep insisting during their automated welcome messages that Internet access is available. O.k., I believe in the good and in things getting better so I tried again on my recent trip. Again, it didn't work. What a letdown!
Dear Thalys, just switch your Wi-Fi off and stop this ridiculous announcement as it's obviously not your intention to improve the situation. This way, your customers will at least not be disappointed by something they are promised. Just admit you've failed and move on.
P.S.: Note that this is not a technical issue, it worked great at the beginning. Also other train companies such as Deutsche Bahn show that working Internet access on high speed trains is possible.
I’ve just looked into how the onboard network and backhaul is desigend on the Thalys. According to press releases it’s 21Net who have delivered the solution for intrain connectivity.
They basicly have two concepts: “Sat 21” where a so-called “brain car” hosts all the backhaul equipment and hands on connectivity through wireless or wired (with up to 10 GBit/s! through fibre) links to the next carriage and “Modular 21” where each carriage has its own wireless backhaul through a terrestrial network (potentially even using different cellular networks) and a wireless mesh network is used to balance traffic among all carriages’ uplinks (see “specifications” tab unter http://www.21net.com/products/sat-21 and http://www.21net.com/products/modular-21).
In both cases it may be worth checking connectivity in other carriages (especially in the brain car with the satellite hump on the roof) as the inter-carriage links or in case of “Modular 21” the mesh network could have failed. Anyway Thalys should get their homework done as the flying competition is adapting inflight connectivity with increasing pace.