Wouldnt it be nice to be able to use high speed internet on the train?

It is actually possible, and perhaps even more so after April when CAT telecom supposedly will release the CCU-680 and open their network for Revision A traffic.

Up untill now we have been stuck with CCU-650 or Aircard 580 and revision 0 of the EVDO technology.

This has given us really slow upload speeds.

Let us take a train as an example, you buy 4 or 10 of these new wireless CCU-680 (when they arrive).

You bundle them to a router or some other equipment which supports Multilink.

Multilink is the key here, with the dial-up protocol multilink you can make several connections appear as one on both sides of the connection.

I tried this one my own computer with one Sierra wireless 580 and one CCU-650, they were able to start the connection, but when the second card tried to connect i was disconnected, this is because the CAT telecom network does not support multilink in their modem pool.

And usually CDMA/EVDO/3G providers never supports this.

If they did however support that technology the train i mentioned before would be able to bundle those together and make them act as one link.

And then getting CAT and HUTCH to support the Multilink protocol in their telecom equipment for EVDO.

They would probably be able to configure this in just for the Railroad authority of Thailand and only for them, mere mortals like the rest of us do not really need that, and anyways some download monkeys would probably get bright ideas themselves and buy a heap of cards and congest the network for the rest of us if this was a possibility for the general public.

Such a multilink setup could very well give the train a combined bandwidth of about 20 Mbps download and 10 Mbps upload.

Those are of course only rough numbers, dependant upon how many connecting USB units you bundle, and the actual speed of the line going to the towers of CAT telecom and/or HUTCH.

They could then have wireless access points running 802.11 A/B/G/N (preferably only N and A) throughout the train and thereby supplying their travellers with internet.

So this means a long trainride might be more appealing because you might actually be able to get some work done, that being if you happened to be a business man or an IT-profesional dependant upon the internet to get your work done.

Perhaps this way more people would use the train, and less people would use polluting airplanes.

Since many of the trains probably passes through some remote areas you do need some sort of Antennas and booster added to the solution aswell.

Actually there are some solutions like this around, they probably use some standard end-user equipment aswell as routers with multilink support and some nice boosting equipment, these kind of solutions are around for buses and trains.

While waiting for the happy day when this is possible i will probably will take my own personal equipment on for a trainride in the close future, hopefully i can get some booster equipment added to the mix to make the journey interesting.

Basically i can most likely get personal internet through my own mix of equipment, but not everyone can be bothered to drag around antennas and adapters and boosters, so provided by the Railroad authority of Thailand on the trains themselves wouldnt be so bad either, and quite possible.