Tested the Wi-Fi on Amtrak's NextGen Acela. Bad News: You No Longer Have an Excuse to Skip Work
The fastest train in the United States has never had the country’s fastest Wi-Fi or anything close to it, but the free 5G-based connectivity onboard Amtrak’s NextGen Acela trains now traveling the Northeast Corridor still represents a substantial advance over Amtrak’s previous efforts, much less what the passenger railroad debuted in 2010.
On a ride from Washington to New York on NextGen Acela’s second day of revenue service in late August, the remarkable thing about the connectivity was how unremarkable it was. After I clicked a green “Accept & Connect” button in my laptop’s browser, my 2022 HP Spectre x360 enjoyed constant bandwidth at speeds of up to 162mph, except for the dead zones of tunnels below Baltimore and the Hudson River.
Ten runs of Ookla's Speedtest app yielded an average download speed of 50.2Mbps and an average upload speed of 28.9Mbps from that Wi-Fi 6e connection. Those figures easily stand up to the performance of airlines’ in-flight Wi-Fi, especially the uploads.
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