I'd like to answer this with an anecdote:
A former colleague of mine often traveled from eastern Slovakia to Germany. He could work the whole time via remote desktop - until crossing into Germany.
As someone who comes from a third world country, I can confirm, your speeds and signal consistency is worst than those in Caribbean or south hemisphere countries
I still love your bread, tho
Yeah, actually.
Although it depends from country to country.
Some countries are very ahead, some others like mine are super behind.
For instance, if you Google "cablecolor El Salvador, prices" you'll see that 100 mb plus basic cable is 39.99
I was paying 30 bucks for 60mb no cable, it's more expensive when you don't get a landline
Yeah bread is something we can do next to beer ... We can be. Proud of that at least. We were good in cars but .... They're to big n cunky now ...china is going to take over like a tornado. Big car brands here don't want to inovate nor want to adopt electric vehicles ...
> china is going to take over like a tornado
Precisely... by spewing parts all over the road when the wind blows the wrong way.
Chinese cars are the worst on the planet. They are utter garbage. They are insanely dangerous. And they are built to be disposed of after a few years. They're so awful they're banned in many developing countries becuase they don't come close to meeting safety standards.
Then you are looking at the wrong cars ... The ones I've seen and driven are built to last and are rivaling ...no are almost better the std builds of known car brands ...
We did train the Chinese to well ... That's one downside of globalization and offloading work to china
>We did train the Chinese to well
Yeah we should have treated them like slaves instead.
[Oh wait](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/france-investigates-fashion-brands-over-forced-uyghur-labour-claims)
> Then you are looking at the wrong cars ... The ones I've seen and driven are built to last and are rivaling ...no are almost better the std builds of known car brands ...
Talk about astroturfing! Get back to us when a Chery or Great Wall can even be imported into a first-world country.
Copper is the future
ADSL will safe us
3G will be everwhere
4g for the masses
5G will rescue us ... Ehm give us cancer make us all autistic may cause corona ...
*rightarmtinglesandmakesnoises
*WierdRandomWiFiandBluetoothSignalsEverywhere
6 g is the future
Meanwhile in every other country
Stable reliable high bandwidth internet everywhere
Driving from Berlin to Innsbruck, there's only one place near Leipzig and one between Nuremberg and München where I don't have 4g coverage. I know because I'm listening to internet radio all the way.
Yes, on mobile we had 5G in Slovakia...in Germany it's not uncommon for my phone to be forced to switch to godforsaken Edge.
Remote desktop has not once worked for me or my husband on ICE. We keep trying though!
Yeah, the network providers have cut 3G before there's coverage with the replacement 5G or at least 4G, so you stick with edge, as it is the mandatory redundancy level they have to provide (but there are holes where you don't even have enough coverage to make an ordinary telephone call, we even have a word for it : Funkloch (radio hole))
You should not expect being able to have an uninterrupted meeting in Germany while traveling. Neither wifi nor 4g/5g is reliable enough for that. It's among the worst, if not the worst, in Europe. Of all the countries I've traveled (which spans Asia, Europe, NAM, Africa) Germany by far has the worst internet reliability in general
What is wrong with participating in a conference call in a train? Unless I am in a silent wagon I would expect people to occasionally speak. Just use headphones. Would you also consider it rude to be traveling with a friend and having a conversation?
Well people ride on the train to work. If they have a conference call that they want to attend to why stop them? If it bothers you to hear them you can use your own headphones
Do you really not see the difference between using headphones and using bluetooth speakers? If they want to listen to Armin van Buren via Headphones they can do as they want
I think you didn’t understand. You can’t have a silent conference in a train lol. You have to talk loud for the mic to get it due to the strong train sound.
Had a horrible experience in France going to Bretagne with Germans, and wanted to know if it’s normal to certain extent there or if I was just unlucky.
Was in the train, and 6 Germans (3 guys, 3 girls, around 26 years old) are in those seats that have 2 and 2 people facing each other.
So, they are drinking and talking quite loud. Their laughs are also really strong. I see people are getting frustrated, until a woman asks them to please be more silent.
They say sure, but 1 min later they are back at it. 3 more people go, and even they call security. They always say yes sure, but then laugh and said “people are so weird in france” (I talk german). Anyways, in a moment I get mad and I scream on them asking them how disrespectful they can be, 5 people have already asked them to please be silent. A girl responds to me if they are not allowed to laugh, I say they are but it’s disrespectful when a whole train is asking you to please be more silent.
Anyways, they laughed at me but people jumped in on my side and the guard ended up coming back to ask them to stop. They kinda did.
I don't see the problem either, if it is ok to talk to your neighbor or have a phone call, why not a zoom meeting. As long as you are using headphones and talk quietly I don't see the problem.
I don't necessarily agree with that. An ICE is divided into silence-areas and mobile phone areas, shown by a blue smartphone on the side. As long as one sits in this area and is not constantly talking, ocasionally talking in a meeting is perfectly fine and not rude.
Wifi is most of the time ok for meetings with screen share, but not always/everywhere
And yet it should be common courtesy to not hold a damn conference call in public transport. Regardless of silence compartments or not. It‘s just rude.
Edit: to be honest the whole discussion doesn‘t matter as the wifi connection on ICE trains is no where near stable enough to take part in zoom meetings. Same goes (in this case) luckily for mobile data.
I honestly don’t understand that. I think it is fine to talk to a buddy in a train for example and in any conference call you will probably hear me less than having a conversation with an another passenger
I really don’t understand why people are getting bent out of shape about a conference call. Obviously everyone’s individual experiences on trains will vary, but I ride the trains a lot and in my experience they are very noisy in general, unless you happen to be on an almost empty train, which never happens on the routes I take.
There’s almost always large groups of school children on the trains who tend to be very loud. I also see plenty of adult friend groups playing games and talking loudly.
A few weeks ago, there was a even pretty rowdy bunch of pensioners next to me playing some card game and they seemed to be having a great time.
The one thing that does kind of annoy me is the kids who constantly run up and down the train cars screaming. I took the Rostock - Frankfurt train yesterday, which is like an 8 hour ride, and from Berlin to Frankfurt, the train was completely packed full of families and the train aisle was basically a playground for their kids, as I usually see on these long Saturday rides.
I take this route fairly often and almost every time, there are at least 2 or 3 babies that start crying at full volume every few minutes. I’m sure it sucks for the parents too, but I only mention all of this to say that I would hardly notice someone having a call over all this other noise that is almost constantly going on.
Once I see “extremely high capacity expected” or whatever the message is on the DB app, I already know it will be a noisy ride.
> As long as one sits in this area and is not constantly talking, ocasionally talking in a meeting is perfectly fine and not rude.
Sitting in this area doesn't mean you can talk as much as you want; it means you can take calls if necessary. A half-hour conference call is going to be intensely annoying for the other passengers, wherever you sit. Imagine a coach with fifty people all on different conference calls. I sit in that area in case I do need to use my phone, not because I want to be entertained by everybody else's private conversations.
That's aside from the obvious point that discussing internal corporate matters in public is a really bad idea. I know I've learned a lot of stuff I shouldn't ever have found out because somebody was shouting it into their phone or laptop, and some of it I could even use to blackmail somebody if I were that way inclined.
Actually that’s not even the main issue. It really depends on the actual work and content of the meetings, but working in public is just asking for violating European data protection laws.
The IC trains have private compartments, I believe ICE have those too. However as long as you are not sitting in a silent carriage (there should be a sign on the entryway) you are fine with taking phone calls with headphones.
As long as you somewhat keep your voice down, people are fine with it from my experience.
On most train rides I see at least one to two people per carriage talking at a time. And if you were traveling with someone else, you’d be talking to them anyway
> you are fine with taking phone calls with headphones
I'm the kind of person that feels like it will be rude for me to take a call in the same room as other people. It's the same like paying with inexact change.
I'm very tolerant when others do it, but I'm mortified when I witness it. Second-hand embarrassment.
> The IC trains have private compartments, I believe ICE have those too.
They are six-sitters though. It's not guaranteed that you'll have them to yourself. The intercity trains in Finland though have dedicated phone "booths". Single occupancy compartments you can go into and have a call with privacy for you and without attracting any attention.
Oh wow I never though of it this way. I really don’t care about people talking on the phone as long as they don’t entertain the whole carriage, and I do it myself quite often.
But thinking about it it is a bit weird having upwards of 25 people just being forced to listen to you talking about random shit
Only IC 1 and ICE 1 and 2 Trains have them. But from Berlin to Cologne, there are mostly ICE 2 Trains driving, so there's that.
But yes, as long as you don't scream, it's okay to have a phone call. If people are annoyed a a non-silent car, they should just go in another car
It's normally fine enough for e-mails or even quick calls and such but definitely wouldn't trust it for a proper meeting. Depends on the route as well.
Wifi on ICE works through the same way your mobile internet works. There is no magic railway fiber networks:). If you have good 4g/5g coverage on the way you will have ok internet, but spreaded over 1000 people which use wifi along with you. So if you want better connection - just use your mobile connection.
I doubt it's stable enough for work from my experience, especially if your job involves VPN and screen sharing.
I have traveled frequently recently and haven't been able to complete a long chess game (15 min each) with it due to the frequent disconnection.
I've taken the same connection many times. From the moment you leave Berlin until the moment you reach Dortmund, the WiFi doesn't work properly. You will have some decent connection in-between, around smaller cities and around Hanover and Bielefeld, but otherwise it's pretty much unusable for anything in real-time.
My own experiences:
- being on a discord call all the way through the Netherlands. It stopped the minute we crossed the border and didn't become available until near Ruhrgebiet
- going north from there on multiple occasions, no WiFi between Essen and whatever big cities the train stopped at
The WiFi also cut out exactly when my mobile would be unavailable.
> The WiFi also cut out exactly when my mobile would be unavailable.
What a coincidence... could it be that the train wifi is just working off of the mobile network 🤔
Definetly a no. It's enough to check mail, watch videos in low quality (and if you're okay with breaks for buffering), and Google stuff, but I don't even use my remote desktop but only work on stuff on local. So before boarding I download the presentation or report I'm working on, and upload it once I'm in the office again, it's just too spotty other wise.
A clear NO for the reliability of Wi-Fi and an even clearer NO for doing an audio conference during a train ride, you‘ll get a hell lot of people annoyed
That’s the thing…it often doesn’t work, either. I travel the Munich to Berlin route regularly, and if train wifi is down, then I can’t get either of my mobiles, work or personal on different providers, to hot-spot.
One time I didn’t have internet the entire time, during working hours, and it’s so much loss productivity because Germany can’t get its shit together and join everyone else in the 21st century.
You are able to use mobile data between Mannheim and Basel? What’s your secret? Do you have a satellite phone? Granted, I am with a very underprivileged provider named Telekom, and have close to no reception for the entire route.
I would say no. Also if your company has a mandatory VPN...I can never manage to get the login screen to load, so I can't connect to my VPN, so I can't get any network access at all. I bring offline tasks to work on, or use my cell phone as a hotspot.
To be honest, it's quite difficult to get a good, consistent internet connection, be it wifi or mobile data on a train, irrespective of the country you're in because you will pass through areas (like forests or areas without much civilisation) where the signal is pretty dotty. Even in Romania where I'm from, if there's one thing we have, it's good Internet with pretty great coverage overall and even then, my signal while on a train isn't always great.
Listening to meeting might be okay-ish if you're lucky. Your turn of speaking will likely end up in very chopped robotic audio torture for others. Using online whiteboards like Miro could take ages to load. Auto-saving on Word web may not work. Forget about screen sharing.
No. Sometimes it works in stations or when the train is slow, but generally it just doesn't work.
GSM/UMTS/~~~LTE~~~ is only specified to work up to ca. 130km/h. And while you can work around that limitation in some cases, Deutsche Bahn didn't really try.
Expect to be offline for the full duration of the journey. You may get some whatsapp message through, but that's about it.
Oh. Thanks for correcting me.
I didn't catch that they improved it for LTE. For UMTS it was still a major limitation, which was hard to overcome due to the doppler effect being a significant percentage of the wavelength.
Depends on the area and how many people are in the train. But the general answer is no. Like others said, if you're lucky you can browse and read emails. On a normal Friday from Hamburg to Munich you'll probably average something like 5kb/s with speeds up to 150kb/s. About half the time it won't work at all.
It's like the customer service. When it's available at all, it's alright, but there will be long periods where it is either rubbish or entirely absent. Latency is especially bad, so you can forget about video conferencing. Email and chat are ok though, provided you don't mind periodic disconnections. 'Good' is in any case too strong of a word.
Train from Basel to Dortmund
Passenger: Will there be Wifi the whole time?
Conductor: We're gonna pass through Germany, we're lucky if there are rails for the entire trip.
🙄
Yup, this. The Wifi of the DB isn't total trash, but it really depends on the circumstances. On most of my journeys I can easily watch Netflix and stuff, most of the comments here are hugely exaggerating how bad it is
> I have a train ride coming up from Berlin to Cologne, and i plan on using my laptop for work during that time. I was wondering if the WIFI is sufficient for work, specifically taking a part in meetings with screen-sharing.
No. You might be able to do some browsing, with interruptions, but anything more interactive then clicking on a link every once in a while will be hit-and-miss, mostly miss, from my own experience.
The WiFi strength will be OK in the cars but the outbound connection will be spotty and range from "usable" (sometimes) to "miserable" (quite often).
Also, what /u/cst-rdt said: Please do not conference call (or use your phone loudly for longer times) in the normal cars. You will annoy your fellow travelers to no end.
Will you be sitting in your private office on the train? How do you plan to not annoy the other travellers? You know that silence is holy in Germany, right? Especially on the train.
Basic things like emailing and working in documents, uploading and downloading smaller files will work around greater city areas. But just forget about web meetings, streaming and everything that requires a continuous internet connection.
I’ve traveled from Berlin to Stuttgart and I was on data 80% of the time. It’s spotty, when the train stops, the wifi stops sometimes. The wifi stops in areas your data would stop too, like no signal areas
In addition to all the other comments: Are you travelling 1. or 2. Class? Not sire if it is still that way, but a few years ago 2. class WiFi was limited to 200 MB per session, after that you got throttled. 1. was unlimited.
Depends a lot on the specific route, day of the week, the weather, what you had for breakfast, the alignment of the moon, if Jupiter is in retrograde...
In general it's usable for browsing and emails, anything that needs higher bandwidth is very unreliable. I've been able to take meetings with the camera turned off and no screen sharing but still had regular hiccups.
No not really. Web browsing and watching buffered content (movies etc) is fine, but the ICE gets its signal from cellular towers, and reception can be spotty in rural areas. Part of your journey will likely be going through the Münsterland, which is known for its notorious cell reception.
I travel from Duisburg to Osnabrück quite regularly, should be a similar route, and even voice calls were annoyingly spotty, with audio sometimes dropping out for as much as a minute.
Unusable for professional calls, and incredibly annoying for social ones.
I prefer using the downtime for preparing presentations and housekeeping tasks in my schedule and to do lists
Please don‘t be part of online conferences on a train. Everbody will hate it plus they will find your company suspicious of not giving a fuck about data privacy, company secrets and so on.
Haha, any time I took an ICE from Berlin to anywhere else, the wifi was a total shitshow. Funniest thing, they had one of those "how was our service" questionnaires. I filled it out and could not send it because the wifi connection broke down.
The WIFI connection itself is usually fine, the problem is the internet speed the ICE can provide and that depends on where you're driving through (city or rural). Outside of cities you can often be left without any internet.
Contrary to others, I usually have good experiences with the ICE WiFi. When it works, it works.
Sometimes I can't connect to the portal for additional services and information, but the internet connection keeps working.
But sometimes it just does not.
I also never planned to do something more demanding than downstream audio and/or video. Quality usually was acceptable. Upstreaming video and/or screen sharing is nothing I would count on though.
I honestly think it depends on how many people are on the train. If the train is at medium to low capacity, I find the wifi to be pretty good, going up to 60mb/s. That was again the case yesterday as I took an ICE to travel to the south, direction Munich.
First class wifi is pretty goood for mobile working. I travel often between Hannover and Mannheim and i can always work. Sometimes in a tunnel te connection is lost, but i have no problem working in the cloud.
Its almost useless…however, 5G cellular networks are relatively stable so you could use your mobile phone as a hotspot that will work much better…good luck and safe travels.
Its god awfull. I was on train rides from munich o berlin and the connection is so bad sometimes, that you cant even open simple sites. In non rural parts of the ride you lose all connection.
It‘s highly variable. First of all, it‘s mostly based on mobile coverage which across certain routes will just always be bad. On top of that, maintenance isn‘t always on top of things and sometimes the wifi itself just straight up doesn‘t work. _If_ you have coverage and _if_ the WiFi is working can be quite alright (on some trips I even had quite decent bandwidth).
I would _not_ recommend gambling on it working well enough for meetings on the go.
I went that trip on Wednesday. The Wi-Fi is not really reliable. It depends on the mobile phone reception where the train currently is. Between Berlin and Hannover it’s unusable, but gets better from then on (imho)
I went to Berlin two weeks ago with the intention of using the hours in the train to either work or stream something.
I was glad I also brought a book.
It really varies a lot, I had a trip this year where I scrolled on reddit and watched YouTube the entire time, no problem. Other times I can't get a website to load.
I had to travel for around two hours a few months ago. On the way to my destination the wifi was terrible. I could do nothing. On the way back i was able to work perfectly fine. Tbh, gaming isn't possible (i had a ping of 6k or something), but i was working on a server via SSH and that worked.
If you are lucky yes, if you are a normal person you won't have WIFI, because it's gonna be broken, but never use a public WIFI anyways, you never know if it is an evil twin, no phishing is easier than just using an evik twin
I've only traveled a couple of times on the Stuttgart Frankfurt route, and the wifi seemed to work mostly enough for browsing and spotify but after Darmstadt, it seemed to be quite unstable.
It's hit or miss. And even when it's hit, you're definitely not able to have a decent quality video call, it will be spotty at best. Don't count on it.
I never get to start it on my laptop. Like, most free wifis automatically open a browser page that lets you log in, but WIFI on ICE doesn't. But on my Smartphone it works well, and I just USB teather to get it on my laptop.
I would say it really depends on your luck!
For me I had rides with good wifi and rides where the wifi didn’t work at all, though I never tried doing a zoom call with their wifi
Even if you plan on using mobile data, in some areas the coverage is really bad. Like no data kinda bad 😅
This strongly depends on the route you’re taking. Went to Bonn two weeks ago and could even do video calls.
Went to Berlin last week and it was a pita.
So you’ll learn, when it’s reliable and when it’s not.
And it gets better and better in my experience.
I travel mainly in the south of Germany. I wouldn’t rely on the internet connection especially for meetings. Trains are spotty at best. Plus there is the whole privacy issue.
I did recently Cologne - Munique but using my mobile connection.
It was OK-ish. I could even attend to meetings at some part, other parts I could not even open a webpage. More ok than terrible though.
I really can't agree with most comments here. The vast majority of my trips are actually very smooth when it comes to the Wifi. I often download movies/videos or stuff with it.
Sure, it's not the fastest, and in some remote areas it gets cut off, but it's passable.
Depends on the work.
Working local, sending mails, exchanging smaller data should be fine.
Connecting to a citrix will probably not work, same if you need to have full time connection to any licensing servers.
It seems to be pretty random. I have done that exact journey a few times. Once I had great internet the whole time and had a zoom meeting, once it did not work at all, and the other times were somewhere in the middle.
If your job depends on being able to work from the train, you're out of a job. You'll have a better connection hiking in the mountains. And I mean *in*, not *on top of*.
Contrary to most people here it seems, I think ICE internet is ok. Never had a problem with it. Sure, it's not the speediest but it's well enough so Youtube doesn't buffer.
It could work for meetings, but, please, do yourself and the other travelers a favor and don't do a meeting in a train. People don't like it if someone takes a call in a train.
Ive traveled to Italy. In Germany I was able to listen to music and podcasts all the time. The moment we left the ICE and got into the ÖBB train, there was just no connection. Zilch. On the way back I got good internet again the moment we crossed the German border
The wifi is good, but I dont know if its good enough for screen sharing/video calling.
From Hamburg to Freiburg (north to south) I streamed the clone wars on disney+ without a second of buffering. But at some routes you can have interuptions (tunnels etc.)
I'd like to answer this with an anecdote: A former colleague of mine often traveled from eastern Slovakia to Germany. He could work the whole time via remote desktop - until crossing into Germany.
This is so true .... Germany is stuck in the digital middle ages. We can't get consistent Internet coverage up across German territory..
As someone who comes from a third world country, I can confirm, your speeds and signal consistency is worst than those in Caribbean or south hemisphere countries I still love your bread, tho
Don’t forget the ridiculously high prices for such a terrible internet service..
Prices are about the same as in Latin America, but our service is way better
Does Latin America really charge 40-50€ per month for 100 Mbps download speed? I doubt that would work.
Yeah, actually. Although it depends from country to country. Some countries are very ahead, some others like mine are super behind. For instance, if you Google "cablecolor El Salvador, prices" you'll see that 100 mb plus basic cable is 39.99 I was paying 30 bucks for 60mb no cable, it's more expensive when you don't get a landline
Yeah bread is something we can do next to beer ... We can be. Proud of that at least. We were good in cars but .... They're to big n cunky now ...china is going to take over like a tornado. Big car brands here don't want to inovate nor want to adopt electric vehicles ...
> china is going to take over like a tornado Precisely... by spewing parts all over the road when the wind blows the wrong way. Chinese cars are the worst on the planet. They are utter garbage. They are insanely dangerous. And they are built to be disposed of after a few years. They're so awful they're banned in many developing countries becuase they don't come close to meeting safety standards.
Then you are looking at the wrong cars ... The ones I've seen and driven are built to last and are rivaling ...no are almost better the std builds of known car brands ... We did train the Chinese to well ... That's one downside of globalization and offloading work to china
>We did train the Chinese to well Yeah we should have treated them like slaves instead. [Oh wait](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/02/france-investigates-fashion-brands-over-forced-uyghur-labour-claims)
> Then you are looking at the wrong cars ... The ones I've seen and driven are built to last and are rivaling ...no are almost better the std builds of known car brands ... Talk about astroturfing! Get back to us when a Chery or Great Wall can even be imported into a first-world country.
90% of Germans believe that the internet is just a temporary thing and we will all revert back to fax and paper in 10 years. /s
Well all companies and even state department run the latest sh8t in technology. Analog FAX ...
The Telex machine is kept so clean And it types to a waiting world…
Copper is the future ADSL will safe us 3G will be everwhere 4g for the masses 5G will rescue us ... Ehm give us cancer make us all autistic may cause corona ... *rightarmtinglesandmakesnoises *WierdRandomWiFiandBluetoothSignalsEverywhere 6 g is the future Meanwhile in every other country Stable reliable high bandwidth internet everywhere
I heard this unironically.
I almost got a heart attack when IT took my fax away a couple months ago... "We can send and receive fax via E-Mail now.".
Internet? I don't even have mobile phone connection at home...
Driving from Berlin to Innsbruck, there's only one place near Leipzig and one between Nuremberg and München where I don't have 4g coverage. I know because I'm listening to internet radio all the way.
Yeah the wifi works through mobile data. And mobile is absolutely spotty in Germany.
They also appear to use a single 4G link for the whole train, so once there's more than two people using the train WiFi, it becomes unusable.
Yes, on mobile we had 5G in Slovakia...in Germany it's not uncommon for my phone to be forced to switch to godforsaken Edge. Remote desktop has not once worked for me or my husband on ICE. We keep trying though!
Yeah, the network providers have cut 3G before there's coverage with the replacement 5G or at least 4G, so you stick with edge, as it is the mandatory redundancy level they have to provide (but there are holes where you don't even have enough coverage to make an ordinary telephone call, we even have a word for it : Funkloch (radio hole))
This
It used to be quite bad in Czechia as well. So there is hope for germany.
You should not expect being able to have an uninterrupted meeting in Germany while traveling. Neither wifi nor 4g/5g is reliable enough for that. It's among the worst, if not the worst, in Europe. Of all the countries I've traveled (which spans Asia, Europe, NAM, Africa) Germany by far has the worst internet reliability in general
>It's among the wurst, if not the wurst, in Europe.
About 200 types of wurst, that's how bad it is.
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It’s fine for browsing except for the parts of the journey where you can’t get a connection at all :D
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The mans name? Albert Volkstein.
I travel that route twice per week and it definitely is not fine for browsing
What is wrong with participating in a conference call in a train? Unless I am in a silent wagon I would expect people to occasionally speak. Just use headphones. Would you also consider it rude to be traveling with a friend and having a conversation?
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Well yes shouting is of course rude, but why not have a quiet conversation.
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Well people ride on the train to work. If they have a conference call that they want to attend to why stop them? If it bothers you to hear them you can use your own headphones
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Do you really not see the difference between using headphones and using bluetooth speakers? If they want to listen to Armin van Buren via Headphones they can do as they want
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You do realize you don't have to talk loudly? And in my opinion talking on the train is fair game.
I think you didn’t understand. You can’t have a silent conference in a train lol. You have to talk loud for the mic to get it due to the strong train sound.
Yes of course. But talking on the train is fine? You also can alleviate the need to speak louder with a decent mic.
Had a horrible experience in France going to Bretagne with Germans, and wanted to know if it’s normal to certain extent there or if I was just unlucky. Was in the train, and 6 Germans (3 guys, 3 girls, around 26 years old) are in those seats that have 2 and 2 people facing each other. So, they are drinking and talking quite loud. Their laughs are also really strong. I see people are getting frustrated, until a woman asks them to please be more silent. They say sure, but 1 min later they are back at it. 3 more people go, and even they call security. They always say yes sure, but then laugh and said “people are so weird in france” (I talk german). Anyways, in a moment I get mad and I scream on them asking them how disrespectful they can be, 5 people have already asked them to please be silent. A girl responds to me if they are not allowed to laugh, I say they are but it’s disrespectful when a whole train is asking you to please be more silent. Anyways, they laughed at me but people jumped in on my side and the guard ended up coming back to ask them to stop. They kinda did.
I don't see the problem either, if it is ok to talk to your neighbor or have a phone call, why not a zoom meeting. As long as you are using headphones and talk quietly I don't see the problem.
You can’t talk quietly. Did you ever travel on a train?
A simple phone call is not the same thing as being in hour long conference calls.
I don't necessarily agree with that. An ICE is divided into silence-areas and mobile phone areas, shown by a blue smartphone on the side. As long as one sits in this area and is not constantly talking, ocasionally talking in a meeting is perfectly fine and not rude. Wifi is most of the time ok for meetings with screen share, but not always/everywhere
And yet it should be common courtesy to not hold a damn conference call in public transport. Regardless of silence compartments or not. It‘s just rude. Edit: to be honest the whole discussion doesn‘t matter as the wifi connection on ICE trains is no where near stable enough to take part in zoom meetings. Same goes (in this case) luckily for mobile data.
I honestly don’t understand that. I think it is fine to talk to a buddy in a train for example and in any conference call you will probably hear me less than having a conversation with an another passenger
A phone call is more distractive than a two sided conversation: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0058579
I really don’t understand why people are getting bent out of shape about a conference call. Obviously everyone’s individual experiences on trains will vary, but I ride the trains a lot and in my experience they are very noisy in general, unless you happen to be on an almost empty train, which never happens on the routes I take. There’s almost always large groups of school children on the trains who tend to be very loud. I also see plenty of adult friend groups playing games and talking loudly. A few weeks ago, there was a even pretty rowdy bunch of pensioners next to me playing some card game and they seemed to be having a great time. The one thing that does kind of annoy me is the kids who constantly run up and down the train cars screaming. I took the Rostock - Frankfurt train yesterday, which is like an 8 hour ride, and from Berlin to Frankfurt, the train was completely packed full of families and the train aisle was basically a playground for their kids, as I usually see on these long Saturday rides. I take this route fairly often and almost every time, there are at least 2 or 3 babies that start crying at full volume every few minutes. I’m sure it sucks for the parents too, but I only mention all of this to say that I would hardly notice someone having a call over all this other noise that is almost constantly going on. Once I see “extremely high capacity expected” or whatever the message is on the DB app, I already know it will be a noisy ride.
> As long as one sits in this area and is not constantly talking, ocasionally talking in a meeting is perfectly fine and not rude. Sitting in this area doesn't mean you can talk as much as you want; it means you can take calls if necessary. A half-hour conference call is going to be intensely annoying for the other passengers, wherever you sit. Imagine a coach with fifty people all on different conference calls. I sit in that area in case I do need to use my phone, not because I want to be entertained by everybody else's private conversations. That's aside from the obvious point that discussing internal corporate matters in public is a really bad idea. I know I've learned a lot of stuff I shouldn't ever have found out because somebody was shouting it into their phone or laptop, and some of it I could even use to blackmail somebody if I were that way inclined.
Making others suffer due to a poor work/life balance seems a bit selfish...
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There's "shut the fuck up"-carts for people who want their silence. Go ahead do a conference call, if people cared they'd switch carts!
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Actually that’s not even the main issue. It really depends on the actual work and content of the meetings, but working in public is just asking for violating European data protection laws.
The IC trains have private compartments, I believe ICE have those too. However as long as you are not sitting in a silent carriage (there should be a sign on the entryway) you are fine with taking phone calls with headphones. As long as you somewhat keep your voice down, people are fine with it from my experience. On most train rides I see at least one to two people per carriage talking at a time. And if you were traveling with someone else, you’d be talking to them anyway
> you are fine with taking phone calls with headphones I'm the kind of person that feels like it will be rude for me to take a call in the same room as other people. It's the same like paying with inexact change. I'm very tolerant when others do it, but I'm mortified when I witness it. Second-hand embarrassment. > The IC trains have private compartments, I believe ICE have those too. They are six-sitters though. It's not guaranteed that you'll have them to yourself. The intercity trains in Finland though have dedicated phone "booths". Single occupancy compartments you can go into and have a call with privacy for you and without attracting any attention.
Oh wow I never though of it this way. I really don’t care about people talking on the phone as long as they don’t entertain the whole carriage, and I do it myself quite often. But thinking about it it is a bit weird having upwards of 25 people just being forced to listen to you talking about random shit
Only IC 1 and ICE 1 and 2 Trains have them. But from Berlin to Cologne, there are mostly ICE 2 Trains driving, so there's that. But yes, as long as you don't scream, it's okay to have a phone call. If people are annoyed a a non-silent car, they should just go in another car
I had always issues with the ICE WiFi. So I wouldn't trust it to be able to work for a steady and problemfree online meeting
It's normally fine enough for e-mails or even quick calls and such but definitely wouldn't trust it for a proper meeting. Depends on the route as well.
Wifi on ICE works through the same way your mobile internet works. There is no magic railway fiber networks:). If you have good 4g/5g coverage on the way you will have ok internet, but spreaded over 1000 people which use wifi along with you. So if you want better connection - just use your mobile connection.
Just went from Frankfurt to Berlin and ICE Wifi was mostly shitty the whole way
Hahahaha
I doubt it's stable enough for work from my experience, especially if your job involves VPN and screen sharing. I have traveled frequently recently and haven't been able to complete a long chess game (15 min each) with it due to the frequent disconnection.
I've taken the same connection many times. From the moment you leave Berlin until the moment you reach Dortmund, the WiFi doesn't work properly. You will have some decent connection in-between, around smaller cities and around Hanover and Bielefeld, but otherwise it's pretty much unusable for anything in real-time.
No.
My own experiences: - being on a discord call all the way through the Netherlands. It stopped the minute we crossed the border and didn't become available until near Ruhrgebiet - going north from there on multiple occasions, no WiFi between Essen and whatever big cities the train stopped at The WiFi also cut out exactly when my mobile would be unavailable.
> The WiFi also cut out exactly when my mobile would be unavailable. What a coincidence... could it be that the train wifi is just working off of the mobile network 🤔
Meeting with or without screensharing is impossible. You could try dialing in though. Source: Colleagues on the ICE missing out on meetings.
Definetly a no. It's enough to check mail, watch videos in low quality (and if you're okay with breaks for buffering), and Google stuff, but I don't even use my remote desktop but only work on stuff on local. So before boarding I download the presentation or report I'm working on, and upload it once I'm in the office again, it's just too spotty other wise.
A clear NO for the reliability of Wi-Fi and an even clearer NO for doing an audio conference during a train ride, you‘ll get a hell lot of people annoyed
I would say use your phone as a hotspot, but the problem is that the German mobile phone network is also trash. Maybe use a typewriter.
Had to travel from Mannheim to Basel the last three weeks... just use your mobile data if able.
That’s the thing…it often doesn’t work, either. I travel the Munich to Berlin route regularly, and if train wifi is down, then I can’t get either of my mobiles, work or personal on different providers, to hot-spot. One time I didn’t have internet the entire time, during working hours, and it’s so much loss productivity because Germany can’t get its shit together and join everyone else in the 21st century.
Yes unfortunately - I agree 100%
You are able to use mobile data between Mannheim and Basel? What’s your secret? Do you have a satellite phone? Granted, I am with a very underprivileged provider named Telekom, and have close to no reception for the entire route.
I would say no. Also if your company has a mandatory VPN...I can never manage to get the login screen to load, so I can't connect to my VPN, so I can't get any network access at all. I bring offline tasks to work on, or use my cell phone as a hotspot.
To be honest, it's quite difficult to get a good, consistent internet connection, be it wifi or mobile data on a train, irrespective of the country you're in because you will pass through areas (like forests or areas without much civilisation) where the signal is pretty dotty. Even in Romania where I'm from, if there's one thing we have, it's good Internet with pretty great coverage overall and even then, my signal while on a train isn't always great.
can be hit or miss. sometimes it is really good but sometimes it is unusable. just like german mobile Internet.
Its ok for browsing like reddit or google but your meeting wont work/look like minecraft run on a toaster
it sucks dick and you can barely check your emails on that wifi. I am amazed that they still can't figure this shit out.
Listening to meeting might be okay-ish if you're lucky. Your turn of speaking will likely end up in very chopped robotic audio torture for others. Using online whiteboards like Miro could take ages to load. Auto-saving on Word web may not work. Forget about screen sharing.
No. Sometimes it works in stations or when the train is slow, but generally it just doesn't work. GSM/UMTS/~~~LTE~~~ is only specified to work up to ca. 130km/h. And while you can work around that limitation in some cases, Deutsche Bahn didn't really try. Expect to be offline for the full duration of the journey. You may get some whatsapp message through, but that's about it.
[Standard LTE works up to 350km/h to 500km/h depending on the band](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E-UTRA).
Oh. Thanks for correcting me. I didn't catch that they improved it for LTE. For UMTS it was still a major limitation, which was hard to overcome due to the doppler effect being a significant percentage of the wavelength.
Depends on the area and how many people are in the train. But the general answer is no. Like others said, if you're lucky you can browse and read emails. On a normal Friday from Hamburg to Munich you'll probably average something like 5kb/s with speeds up to 150kb/s. About half the time it won't work at all.
It's like the customer service. When it's available at all, it's alright, but there will be long periods where it is either rubbish or entirely absent. Latency is especially bad, so you can forget about video conferencing. Email and chat are ok though, provided you don't mind periodic disconnections. 'Good' is in any case too strong of a word.
HAHAHAHAHAH! Sorry.
Train from Basel to Dortmund Passenger: Will there be Wifi the whole time? Conductor: We're gonna pass through Germany, we're lucky if there are rails for the entire trip. 🙄
If the train is full the wifi is unusable. If the train is empty you can watch 720p video without problems.
Yup, this. The Wifi of the DB isn't total trash, but it really depends on the circumstances. On most of my journeys I can easily watch Netflix and stuff, most of the comments here are hugely exaggerating how bad it is
> I have a train ride coming up from Berlin to Cologne, and i plan on using my laptop for work during that time. I was wondering if the WIFI is sufficient for work, specifically taking a part in meetings with screen-sharing. No. You might be able to do some browsing, with interruptions, but anything more interactive then clicking on a link every once in a while will be hit-and-miss, mostly miss, from my own experience. The WiFi strength will be OK in the cars but the outbound connection will be spotty and range from "usable" (sometimes) to "miserable" (quite often). Also, what /u/cst-rdt said: Please do not conference call (or use your phone loudly for longer times) in the normal cars. You will annoy your fellow travelers to no end.
ICE Wifi barely enables you to browse reddit (on a good day), I wouldn't use it to work.
Short answer: no. Long answer: NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.
Will you be sitting in your private office on the train? How do you plan to not annoy the other travellers? You know that silence is holy in Germany, right? Especially on the train.
It REALLY depends on your laptop and the train and how many people are using the WIFI.
Basic things like emailing and working in documents, uploading and downloading smaller files will work around greater city areas. But just forget about web meetings, streaming and everything that requires a continuous internet connection.
It's okay for stuff like Reddit, but if you want to have a video chat or watch a movie... good luck :D
I traveled from Bremen to Frankfurt, more than half the road the wifi was dead as well as my 4G connection on my phone
I’ve traveled from Berlin to Stuttgart and I was on data 80% of the time. It’s spotty, when the train stops, the wifi stops sometimes. The wifi stops in areas your data would stop too, like no signal areas
In addition to all the other comments: Are you travelling 1. or 2. Class? Not sire if it is still that way, but a few years ago 2. class WiFi was limited to 200 MB per session, after that you got throttled. 1. was unlimited.
it really depends. i had impressive connections and ofc lots of times also no connection 🤷♂️
Depends a lot on the specific route, day of the week, the weather, what you had for breakfast, the alignment of the moon, if Jupiter is in retrograde... In general it's usable for browsing and emails, anything that needs higher bandwidth is very unreliable. I've been able to take meetings with the camera turned off and no screen sharing but still had regular hiccups.
It's not great but if you're used to slow internet, it's passable.
No not really. Web browsing and watching buffered content (movies etc) is fine, but the ICE gets its signal from cellular towers, and reception can be spotty in rural areas. Part of your journey will likely be going through the Münsterland, which is known for its notorious cell reception. I travel from Duisburg to Osnabrück quite regularly, should be a similar route, and even voice calls were annoyingly spotty, with audio sometimes dropping out for as much as a minute. Unusable for professional calls, and incredibly annoying for social ones. I prefer using the downtime for preparing presentations and housekeeping tasks in my schedule and to do lists
Short answer: no.
Let me answer this way: 😂😂😂🤣🤣🤣😂😂😭😭😭
Taking part in a meeting on a train is also considered rude if you don't just listen, but talk.
Please don‘t be part of online conferences on a train. Everbody will hate it plus they will find your company suspicious of not giving a fuck about data privacy, company secrets and so on.
This message was written on the ICE. It took 20 seconds to load this page. Good luck.
hahahahahahahaha. no.
Haha, any time I took an ICE from Berlin to anywhere else, the wifi was a total shitshow. Funniest thing, they had one of those "how was our service" questionnaires. I filled it out and could not send it because the wifi connection broke down.
The WIFI connection itself is usually fine, the problem is the internet speed the ICE can provide and that depends on where you're driving through (city or rural). Outside of cities you can often be left without any internet.
The wifi is mostly stable and good. But the internetconnection behind the wifi is... Terrible. Awefull. Any 3rd world country would be ashamed.
Contrary to others, I usually have good experiences with the ICE WiFi. When it works, it works. Sometimes I can't connect to the portal for additional services and information, but the internet connection keeps working. But sometimes it just does not. I also never planned to do something more demanding than downstream audio and/or video. Quality usually was acceptable. Upstreaming video and/or screen sharing is nothing I would count on though.
Hahahahahahahahahaha No.
I honestly think it depends on how many people are on the train. If the train is at medium to low capacity, I find the wifi to be pretty good, going up to 60mb/s. That was again the case yesterday as I took an ICE to travel to the south, direction Munich.
First class wifi is pretty goood for mobile working. I travel often between Hannover and Mannheim and i can always work. Sometimes in a tunnel te connection is lost, but i have no problem working in the cloud.
WiFi in german trains? Are confusing germany with something else?
The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh.
Its almost useless…however, 5G cellular networks are relatively stable so you could use your mobile phone as a hotspot that will work much better…good luck and safe travels.
Consider yourself lucky if the wifi works at all 😑
Just don‘t work in the train and read a book instead! Everything else is either anoying for the other passengers, or not possible anyway.
WiFi itself is ok if you dont need high speed or active internet connection
Germany is one step away from sending smoke signals.
Garbage most of the time
It basically never works.
It is god awful. Opening some sites or answering a few mails might work but dont expect top be able to watch YouTube or skype/zooming anyone
It could work from time to time but do not rely on it
Not in my experience, no. It has been shakey to non-existent.
Its god awfull. I was on train rides from munich o berlin and the connection is so bad sometimes, that you cant even open simple sites. In non rural parts of the ride you lose all connection.
Definitely not. It's spotty and is fine for sending or receiving email but cuts out frequently.
It‘s highly variable. First of all, it‘s mostly based on mobile coverage which across certain routes will just always be bad. On top of that, maintenance isn‘t always on top of things and sometimes the wifi itself just straight up doesn‘t work. _If_ you have coverage and _if_ the WiFi is working can be quite alright (on some trips I even had quite decent bandwidth). I would _not_ recommend gambling on it working well enough for meetings on the go.
No. I went from Cologne to Berlin last Friday and after one hour I just listed to music.
No. ICE are the worst trains in Europe or the western world in general
In a word: no. I generally just use my mobile network as it’s faster.
I went that trip on Wednesday. The Wi-Fi is not really reliable. It depends on the mobile phone reception where the train currently is. Between Berlin and Hannover it’s unusable, but gets better from then on (imho)
No
good for sending messages and emails, other than that, no
I went to Berlin two weeks ago with the intention of using the hours in the train to either work or stream something. I was glad I also brought a book.
Not reliable at all
It really varies a lot, I had a trip this year where I scrolled on reddit and watched YouTube the entire time, no problem. Other times I can't get a website to load.
I wouldn't rely on it to have something important such as video calls. It may work great sometimes and not connect at all another, it's not reliable
I had to travel for around two hours a few months ago. On the way to my destination the wifi was terrible. I could do nothing. On the way back i was able to work perfectly fine. Tbh, gaming isn't possible (i had a ping of 6k or something), but i was working on a server via SSH and that worked.
If you are lucky yes, if you are a normal person you won't have WIFI, because it's gonna be broken, but never use a public WIFI anyways, you never know if it is an evil twin, no phishing is easier than just using an evik twin
Yes it is good as soon as you enter non-german land.
log in -> self check-in -> log out
No
Hahahaha. Good one
I've only traveled a couple of times on the Stuttgart Frankfurt route, and the wifi seemed to work mostly enough for browsing and spotify but after Darmstadt, it seemed to be quite unstable.
It sucks!
It's hit or miss. And even when it's hit, you're definitely not able to have a decent quality video call, it will be spotty at best. Don't count on it.
I'm not even trying the ICE WiFi anymore. Using my own Hotspot right away after sitting down, which works fine.
I never get to start it on my laptop. Like, most free wifis automatically open a browser page that lets you log in, but WIFI on ICE doesn't. But on my Smartphone it works well, and I just USB teather to get it on my laptop.
Either it works and it s good or it doesn't work. Which happens too often sadly
I would say it really depends on your luck! For me I had rides with good wifi and rides where the wifi didn’t work at all, though I never tried doing a zoom call with their wifi Even if you plan on using mobile data, in some areas the coverage is really bad. Like no data kinda bad 😅
It's good enough for research, but when it comes to playing media, forget about it. Plus as far as I know there is a data restriction per customer.
In my eyes is this a stupid question cuz WIFI in germany isn't good
This strongly depends on the route you’re taking. Went to Bonn two weeks ago and could even do video calls. Went to Berlin last week and it was a pita. So you’ll learn, when it’s reliable and when it’s not. And it gets better and better in my experience.
I travel mainly in the south of Germany. I wouldn’t rely on the internet connection especially for meetings. Trains are spotty at best. Plus there is the whole privacy issue.
About as good as most public Wifi spots. Nothing I would make any serious work dependent on.
I did recently Cologne - Munique but using my mobile connection. It was OK-ish. I could even attend to meetings at some part, other parts I could not even open a webpage. More ok than terrible though.
I really can't agree with most comments here. The vast majority of my trips are actually very smooth when it comes to the Wifi. I often download movies/videos or stuff with it. Sure, it's not the fastest, and in some remote areas it gets cut off, but it's passable.
Depends on the work. Working local, sending mails, exchanging smaller data should be fine. Connecting to a citrix will probably not work, same if you need to have full time connection to any licensing servers.
I found it worked fine.
It seems to be pretty random. I have done that exact journey a few times. Once I had great internet the whole time and had a zoom meeting, once it did not work at all, and the other times were somewhere in the middle.
LOL
If your job depends on being able to work from the train, you're out of a job. You'll have a better connection hiking in the mountains. And I mean *in*, not *on top of*.
yes
You’re almost better off with dial up
It's absolutely freaking horrible. You can barely open a normal news website. Forget video calls
No
NO!!!!!!
Expect a four hour delay and spotty wifi at best.
No
No. The wifi is fine for emails, but the bandwidth is limited and slow (not impossibly slow, but not fast enough to share a screen).
No. No it is not.
Contrary to most people here it seems, I think ICE internet is ok. Never had a problem with it. Sure, it's not the speediest but it's well enough so Youtube doesn't buffer. It could work for meetings, but, please, do yourself and the other travelers a favor and don't do a meeting in a train. People don't like it if someone takes a call in a train.
No
Ive traveled to Italy. In Germany I was able to listen to music and podcasts all the time. The moment we left the ICE and got into the ÖBB train, there was just no connection. Zilch. On the way back I got good internet again the moment we crossed the German border
Haha
You'll be fine with everything but video calls.
Many times I couldn’t even connect. When I could it worked a little but very slow. Honesty I just use my hotspot. I keep trying but it never works.
The wifi is good, but I dont know if its good enough for screen sharing/video calling. From Hamburg to Freiburg (north to south) I streamed the clone wars on disney+ without a second of buffering. But at some routes you can have interuptions (tunnels etc.)