What is the value proposition for wifi at stations?
If you can offload an amount of those people from asking your staff questions about train times and connections and get them checking online instead, I would guess that could be a cost saving?
I suppose it is also something that helps make the train more appealing than other forms of transport. If I know I can turn up 30 mins early and get some work done (or just browse the web), then that help cement the train as a nicer way to travel compared to a bus, or even a car where you cannot work at all if you are the driver.
Especially nowadays, with Britain out of the EU and "roam like at home" policies no longer in effect.
I thought they were generally still in effect. The multiple UK and non-UK networks I'm aware of still allow free roaming across UK and EU etc.
We need a better way of doing it though, this unauthenticated network with a captive portal running on some embedded device or some php on a cloud server somewhere is total junk.
There is wifi that is authed via your mobile provider on TFL (now mostly redundant as lines now have 4g/5g) but I think it's actually also piped back to your mobile provider and usage comes out of your allowance if you've got one. What if we were able to do the auth step via sim (so we know who is on the network if there's bad traffic) but terminated the traffic ourselves (i.e doesn't come out of your mobile allowance or get piped to them in the first place).
It's a financial consideration - mobile companies charge what they think people will pay. You can't have a technical solution to that.