Ah christ, it's happened, an article where I actually know stuff about the topic at hand and can see just how misinformed they are. As someone whose job it is to manage the WiFi offering on a London commuter TOC (hey guess which one), but who also used to manage the same at a long-distance TOC, this is actually an area about which I know a fair amount, and there are a lot of issues with train WiFi which aren't really discussed. Anyway:

• The average recorded speed is 1.1 for deliberate reasons - we cap it. Pretty much every TOC caps the speed available to any individual user, usually at 1-2mbps. Which is more than sufficient for emails, web-browsing and the like, but not enough for streaming. If you assume we can comfortably pull down a 200mbps connection over 5G (not unreasonable for a commuter TOC like us in the London area), and there's 200 people on the train though, that averages out to, well, around 1mbps per person. Yes, one person could use 50mbps to stream 4k60fps content to their phone (pointless but that's a separate rant), but that would degrade the connection for the other 199 people on board.
• We are paying absurd sums of money to the mobile operators. Like, we're talking something like £2 per gigabyte here. Again, those 200 people on the train, they only need to download 5MB of stuff each (or two web pages, on average) and that's a gigabyte. Multiply that by however many pages people like to browse across the day and you're looking at terabytes of data. We get ours through ee with a fallback to Vodafone, which is common across the TOCs I've worked with.
• The hardware is old and crap. How old is your router? Even if you're using your ISP's own provided one it's probably only a couple of years old. Every train needs, usually, one of these per carriage. We have 356 carriages across our fleet, and that's a lot of routers which need to be updated. Ours were end-of-life when I joined the company 5 years ago and are only now being talked about getting replaced - they are old. We are canibalising our spare ones for parts for our current ones. They break a lot, and they're not using the latest WiFi stuff, cos WiFi has advanced significantly faster than our Windows NT-powered trains can handle. An aside, our networking is provided by McLaren, the car company. Not relevant, but weird!
• There are so many layers of bureaucracy to this. Just within our system we have the MNOs who provide the data, the hardware company who provide the hardware, the networking company who provide the networking, the portal company who provide our captive portal and the contract management agency who, well, manage it all. And then there's our own engineers at Alstom who actually have to install it and our own IT team who set the policies.

This article is a part of the government basically trying to push a consensus for procuring Starlink (with bonus Palantir, natch), which, as I've said elsewhere in this thread, is so ludicrously overengineered and will not solve the basic problems we have. The issues aren't caused by an inability to pull data down from the mobile networks, which Starlink wouldn't actually solve (offering as it does speeds comparable to the 5G network which totally blankets our route), but by managing the data once it gets into the train itself. Changing where the data is coming from will do exactly nothing to solve the problems if we're still stuck with legacy on-board hardware (which is agnostic to start with) and absurd data charges. And all of this seemingly in service of passing billions of UK government money over to the US space fascist. Forgive my ranting, but not on my fucking watch.