In Bologna, the satellite is not perceived. The train is stopped in the underground High-Speed station and the speed test returns 11.2 megabits per second download, 12.2 upload, and 90 milliseconds latency. But above the train there are obviously meters of concrete and Starlink, Space X’s satellite network led by Elon Musk, without sky, does not work. With it, Italo has signed an agreement to have connections worthy of the name even while traveling.
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Ten minutes are enough and the picture changes. Leaving Bologna towards Milan, the download rises to 137 Mbps, the upload to 8.7, and the latency drops to 69 milliseconds. Shortly after, the connection reaches 192 Mbps. These are not the over 400 Mbps reached by Italo during almost a year of tests on trains at 300 kilometers per hour, but they are enough to understand that railway Wi-Fi can stop being the lottery to which travelers have become accustomed.
Covered more than half of the fleet
The promise of the railway operator belonging to the Msc Group is that all this becomes a guaranteed reality for Italo travelers, on any train and anywhere in Italy. “By the end of the year, 45 trains out of 51 will be covered. By March, we will have completed the work on the entire fleet,” says Gianbattista La Rocca, CEO of Italo, speaking to Sole 24 Ore. Today, 19 trains are equipped; by the end of September, they will become 27, more than half of the fleet. Then the acceleration: 45 by December and all 51 trains currently available by March 2027. The new ones will be natively equipped, like the Siemens trains destined for Germany.
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Connection while traveling
At the base, there is a node that no one can hide: the quality of the connection, emblem of one of the small great paradoxes of Italian mobility: traveling very fast and, at the same time, having an Internet connection that does not always (perhaps better to say “rarely”) manage to keep up.
The agreement between Italo and Starlink has, as said, the ambition to put all this in the past. “The technological investment in connection cost a little over 10 million as installations on the trains,” La Rocca specifies. To these are added “a few million euros per year” between service and maintenance. The connection is free: it serves to raise quality and attract especially business and international tourism.
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