I am on wi-fi on the Thalys high-speed train from Amsterdam to Brussels (it is high speed - 300 kph - between Brussels and Paris. In Netherlands the speed are much slower as my map shows). My laptop is talking to a server on the train which communicates via a tracking antenna on the roof to a satellite which then connects to the Internet backbone.
We are sharing satellite bandwidth via algorithms by 21Net with 25 other trains on the Thalys network (which covers four countries - France, Germany, Belgium and The Netherlands). So, very different architecture than the air-to-ground station communication being used on the Go Go network I wrote about recently. In a tunnel, the satellite link is handed off to a terrestrial GPRS network.
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