Mobile Broadband Performance Measured from High-Speed Regional Trains

Abstract—While mobile broadband performance measured from moving vehicles in metropolitan areas has drawn significant attentions in recent studies, similar investigations have not been conducted for regional areas. Compared to metropolitan cities, regional suburbs are often serviced by wireless technologies with significantly lower data rates and less dense deployments. Conversely, vehicle speeds are usually much higher in the regional areas. In this paper, we seek to provide some insights to user experience of mobile broadband in terms of TCP throughput when travelling in a regional train. We find that (1) using a single broadband provider may lead to a large number of blackouts, which could be reduced drastically by simultaneously subscribing to multiple providers (provider blackouts are not highly correlated), (2) the choice of train route may have a more significant effect on broadband experience than the time-of-day of a particular trip, and (3) the speed of the train itself has no deterministic effect on TCP throughput. I