A recent study from business comparison service Bionic claims to have identified the best and worst UK train line operators for onboard WiFi internet access, which was achieved by analysing negative reviews that mentioned the service. The results suggest that the best operator for WiFi is ScotRail, while the worst came out as Cross Country trains.
In order to arrive at its results, the study examined both the percentage of negative online reviews that referenced WiFi and the train line’s overall rating. Conversely, this means that, for the Wi-Fi ranking, the closer the score is to one, the better the onboard broadband connectivity is (i.e. for Wi-Fi on trains).
However, we would have much rather seen a more scientific or crowd-based study, ideally one that specifically examined onboard WiFi performance via network testing / speedtests than relying on flaky online consumer reviews. In addition, we don’t know how many negative reviews were collected for each operator or from where, which suggests to us that these results should be taken with a big pinch of salt and not treated too seriously.
Overall, ScotRail came top because just 1% of their online reviews related to the onboard Wi-Fi and the operator itself had an overall rating of 3 out of 5, giving them an overall score of 2.5 on Bionic’s index. By comparison, Cross Country trains had the worst onboard Wi-Fi in the UK, with a score of 21.8. This poor score is a reflection of the 4.74% of reviews that include a negative sentiment towards Wi-Fi performance, and the low overall ranking of the train operator itself (1.5 out of 5).