Can You Work on Amtrak's Free Wi-Fi? We Tested It to Find Out
Americans like to be on the move. The AAA says more than 100 million people traveled for the 2021 holidays, even with the threat of Omicron sweeping the nation. And while you can drive with your phone in hotspot mode or pay through the nose for airline Wi-Fi, buses and trains have one advantage over those means of travel: free Wi-Fi.
Amtrak has offered Wi-Fi on some trains since 2010, and on longer-distance routes since 2016. With some new test software to try out, I thought I'd hop on a train and see whether the notoriously questionable Wi-Fi quality has gotten any better in recent years.
In 2019, before the pandemic dug into business travel, Amtrak served up 32,519,241 rides. More than 38% of those were on the eight-state Northeast Corridor spine, from Boston to Washington. (The next most popular route is the Pacific Surfliner from LA to San Diego, with 8.5% of rides.) About 14% of travelers rode on Amtrak's long-distance routes, such as the epic New York to Chicago or Chicago to Seattle runs.
So I picked three routes to test. First, train 190 runs from New York to Boston in the morning. It runs through commuter towns and mid-sized cities on the Northeast Corridor, along tracks owned by Amtrak and commuter railroads.
Train 448 is part of the long-distance Lake Shore Limited to Chicago, crossing rural Massachusetts partially on a single-track CSX freight line. Amtrak has little control over what happens there, so it's my representative of the cross-country trains.
Finally, Train 64 runs from Toronto all the way down to New York City; I rode it from Albany to New York, on tracks owned by Amtrak and New York's Metro-North.
The map of dropped data connections on the trip (above; note the tabbed views) looks worse than
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