Rail passengers increasingly expect onboard Wi-Fi to mirror the always-on, content-rich experience of their home broadband. New figures from connectivity specialist Icomera – published today on World Wi-Fi Day – indicate that Google, Instagram and Facebook are absorbing the biggest share of on-train Wi-Fi bandwidth.
Key Findings
- Passenger use of Google is the single largest consumer of on-train Wi-Fi bandwidth.
- Image- and short-video platforms Instagram, Facebook and TikTok followed close behind.
- Long-form streaming services such as Netflix, YouTube and Amazon Prime Video all feature in the top 10, alongside music-streaming leaders Spotify and Apple’s iTunes.
- WhatsApp was the most widely used messaging app; Snapchat appeared in the North American top ten but not in the European list.
From Email to Entertainment
“When on-train Wi-Fi was first offered in the early 2000s, it primarily attracted business passengers with the promise of improving their productivity by allowing them to send work emails while they travelled” says Paul Barnes, Chief Marketing Officer at Icomera, a subsidiary of Equans, a global leader in the energy and services sector.
“Today we see a typical user consume 100 megabytes during a Wi-Fi session, which would be enough for those early 2000s business passengers to send potentially 1,000+ emails over the course of their journey – but most of that data is now being used for streaming video, music and social media. All passenger groups want the home broadband experience on the move”.
This raises the question of how rail operators can keep pace with the constantly evolving digital landscape.
Starlink Enters the Mix
Low Earth orbit (LEO) satellite networks are emerging as a viable solution for meeting increasing passenger expectations and evolving rail operator requirements. Icomera signed an authorised reseller agreement with SpaceX’s Starlink in December 2024 and is trialling the service with operators on both sides of the Atlantic.
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Icomera’s analysis covers the period from 28th May 2024 to 27th May 2025, drawing on the anonymised Wi-Fi traffic of 2.2 million daily users categorised by service types from thousands of trains in Europe and North America. Rankings are based on total data volume per service type. Passengers’ personal information was not collected. |
