(The following article by J.D. Biersdorfer was posted on the New York Times website on January 15.)
NEW YORK — If not for the lack of privacy, Superman would love a telephone booth like this: nice comfy chairs, a snack bar and plenty of scenery rolling by. Amtrak trains – particularly the Acela Express between Boston and Washington – have become a rolling office for many, from college students to salesmen making deals up and down the rails.
Even though it generally takes longer than flying, train travel is preferred by some because cellphones are allowed, not to mention the other amenities, like conference tables, wide seats, electrical outlets and a well-stocked cafe car.
“You can use e-mail and the phone on the BlackBerry,” said Michael Rieger, a salesman for Tyco who was traveling north on the Acela last week after a meeting in Washington. “You can do business.”
His associate, Jim Olson, agreed. “It’s why we take the train.” He said that he and Mr. Rieger took Amtrak twice a month on business and did work on board in both directions – largely by cellphone.
Both men have AT&T Wireless phones, and Mr. Rieger carries a Verizon phone with him too, using AT&T for international business and Verizon because he likes the quality of the company’s service.
But how good is the coverage for voice and data connections along this heavily traveled route? To get some perspective, I took six wireless phones on a round trip between New York and Washington to compare the reliability of service from AT&T Wireless, Cingular, Nextel, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless.
Most Amtrak trains have a “quiet car” where phone calls and even loud talking are banned in favor of monastic silence, so I took extra care to avoid sitting there. Once the train was rolling, phone calls began to be placed and received everywhere but in the quiet car, and they weren’t just from me.
Armed with my sextet of handsets (and much to the dismay of the people unlucky enough to be sitting nearby), I started calling everyone I could think of from New York to California to see if the calls would go through on the first try, what the sound quality was like and whether my call would be dropped in the middle of the conversation.
On both the four-hour trip to Washington on the Amtrak Regional and the three-hour trip back to New York on the Acela, the Verizon Wireless phone, an LG VX6000, performed the best and most consistently for me. I was able to make calls with a satisfactory sound, upload photos from the phone’s built-in camera (a series I like to call “Self Portrait on Train With Borrowed Camera Phone, Nos. 1 to 3”) and check the Internet pretty much everywhere along the route. There was a little flicker of silence in New Jersey, and the service dropped a call in Maryland, but the Verizon phone even got a signal in a tunnel near Baltimore when none of the other phones worked.
The T-Mobile phone, a Samsung E715 that I took to calling The Catherine Zeta-Phone because of the photo of the company’s perky spokesactress on its screen, also did fairly well in keeping a signal and making calls when I wanted to make them. The sound quality didn’t seem as good as that of the Verizon calls, though. A friend called me the next day to say that a message I’d left on her answering machine was garbled at the end, and T-Mobile dropped a call to Clinton, N.Y., when I was outside Baltimore. The picture of Catherine Zeta-Jones, however, was very nice, as were the photos I snapped with the phone and e-mailed to people.
There were definitely dead spots along the route with AT&T Wireless; the Nokia 6800’s color screen flashed the No Service graphic north of Trenton and between Baltimore-Washington International Airport and Washington. I had a couple of calls with bad sound quality, but made several more that were perfectly fine.
Cingular is relatively new to the New York wireless carrier market, having arrived in the summer of 2002. While service was generally good around New York, the LG 4050 handset I was using had to roam off the Cingular network on several occasions to maintain a signal, especially around Philadelphia and in parts of Delaware and Maryland. (The higher-priced roaming rates are anathema to cellphone users who have nationwide coverage plans that will keep you at the same price every month if you stay on the same wireless network and do not borrow space on another.) The call quality was good near big cities, but a call was dropped between Philadelphia and Wilmington, and another had such bad sound quality that I felt as if I was at a punk rock concert.
Sprint, the service I use for nationwide coverage because I can make calls when I visit my parents in Indiana (though it often goes into roaming mode when I go into the bedroom of my New York apartment), was pretty solid from New York through Pennsylvania. Service was sketchier and the call quality was shakier farther south. A call from my LG 5350 handset was dropped between Wilmington and Baltimore, and service was lost for several minutes in parts of northern Maryland. The service went into roaming mode around Baltimore, but returned to its network just north of Washington.
The phone with Nextel service had the hardest time keeping a consistent signal on the trip, perhaps because of the nature of the Nextel network, which does not roam to others. I was using it only as a wireless phone – I did not take advantage of the walkie-talkie Direct Connect feature for instant chatting – but the Motorola i730 displayed the No Service message three or four times along the way for three to five minutes at a time. Most of the service failures occurred south of Philadelphia and on either side of Baltimore. But when the phone was in an area with Nextel network coverage, the call quality was quite good.
Many variables can affect a wireless phone call, including network traffic, weather, terrain, buildings and the quality of the phone. From my casual testing and conversations with other regular wireless customers on the train, I was able to see some patterns emerging. Several riders spoke of a dead spot on the route between Princeton Junction and Trenton, where calls through several carriers routinely cut out in the middle of a conversation. Parts of Maryland had spotty service. Passengers spoke of a stretch in Connecticut and Rhode Island where coverage is notoriously sparse.
Jeff Feinstein, a sports management student at George Washington University who frequently takes the train to and from New York with his Verizon handset, said he often had problems keeping his calls intact. “If I make 10 calls on the train, only about half of them are problem-free,” he said.
While riding the rails does offer the freedom to phone, dropped calls are a big fear for many passengers, especially salespeople doing business. “There are calls I won’t make on the train because I don’t want to drop them,” said Steve Riehl, a Verizon Wireless user who works in sales at Cogent Communications.
Mr. Riehl and a co-worker at Cogent, Austin Hover, who said they take the train between Boston and Washington “three times every quarter,” are well versed in the art of train-phoning. Mr. Hover said he made 35 business calls just on the Boston-to-New York leg of their last trip down to Washington.
Mr. Hover said that over all, he was pleased with the service on his Nextel phone, provided by his company, but that calling was not trouble-free. “I just went through three pockets of getting service and then not getting service,” said Mr. Hover, waving his phone when we were in Maryland and traveling north back toward New York on the Acela. Much to his dismay, his next call, to someone in Ohio, dropped out a few minutes later.
Coverage, of course, is only part of the equation in choosing a carrier that will serve you well on the road or rails. There is also the question of choosing a plan that will avoid or minimize roaming charges outside your coverage area, which can add 69 to 79 cents per minute of a call. Many wireless companies offer regional, nationwide and international plans. Typically a New York regional plan, for example, will not extend to Washington. If you travel often along the Northeast corridor, a nationwide plan that covers you anywhere on a carrier’s network probably makes the most sense.
Whatever the challenges of working from the train, business does get done, and one advantage remains indisputable. “Even if the service isn’t great,” Mr. Hover said, “you can still use your phone a lot more than on a plane.”