I believe that Via rail has seriously upgraded its on-train wifi service.

The Via Rail wifi service has received very poor reviews in the past.

I honestly couldn't really tell if the system was cellular based, or satellite based, as the latency hovered around 150-200ms.

The Via Rail wifi service just plain works, it's reliable and predictable. Far better than I expected for a mobile wifi service.

Did I also mention that it's free now???   

On a 2 hour trip, there only appeared to be a few dead spots where my streaming radio actually died out, and it was in a mini-canyon area in a rural area with plenty of foliage, so it wasn't unexpected.

The system blocks file downloads greater than 10mb, as well as heavy media sites like youtube and grooveshark. However, as I said, I found a streaming radio service that was unblocked that had made the (much-delayed) trip much more enjoyable :)

I had trouble logging into IRC, which I could not figure out why.

Via says that the service does not support VPN access, but I wasn't able to actually test this out. It does support SSL over Port 80, so, for the technically inclined, it supports everything :)

I tried making a VoIP call through my Nokia e63, and it was only slightly laggy, but quite choppy. Not bad for a quick phone call though. I was impressed.

Speed tests usually looked like the following:


This was one of my speedtests:

Not bad! Even if the system is satellite based, these definitely aren't (or don't feel like) geosynchronous satellites with their massive lag.

Via Rail wifi appears to be running a Barracuda bandwidth shaping/limiting system, which I can't really blame them for.            

They're also running a Squid-based transparent internet proxy, but I can't tell if it's running on the train itself (which would make a lot of sense), or at their headquarters (where any benefit is marginal). Some websites which I believe to be commonly accessed didn't "instantly" load, so I suspect that the proxy is off-train, or not very reliable.