Ofcom has released research confirming what every commuter already knew: phone networks on trains are terrible, and train companies are making their Wi-Fi worse on purpose. This is being celebrated as progress.

The regulatory body found that major carriers cannot maintain decent signal while trains move at speed. This is not news — it is physics, wrapped in a report, funded by taxpayers. But here is where it gets good: train operators, faced with the challenge of providing functional connectivity, have decided the solution is to throttle the Wi-Fi so aggressively that even the illusion of internet access disappears.

Why would they do this? Because bandwidth costs money, and passengers cannot sue you for a service you never claimed to offer. Train companies have effectively weaponised the concept of “managed expectations” by ensuring expectations can no longer be managed — they simply vanish.

The industry is now framing this catastrophe as a feature. Connectivity, they suggest, is exhausting. Always-on culture is toxic. What if, instead of being stranded without signal because we failed to build infrastructure, you were stranded without signal because you chose the authentic experience of disconnection? What if the problem was not us, but your addiction to working?

This rhetorical move is so audacious it deserves its own Wikipedia entry. The trains are not broken — your expectations are broken. The Wi-Fi is not slow — you are too dependent on speed. The network is not down — you are too online.

Passengers on the London-Manchester line will now enjoy a guaranteed 45-minute window where email becomes theoretical and Slack messages exist only in the quantum realm. This is being sold as wellness. Meditation pods have nothing on a train carriage where your video call freezes at the exact moment your boss asks for the quarterly numbers.

Ofcom’s report is thorough and damning. The networks cannot deliver. The trains will not help. The Wi-Fi is a prank. And yet nothing will change, because the infrastructure required to fix this costs billions, and nobody is willing to pay. So instead, the industry will pivot to lifestyle marketing. “Disconnect to reconnect,” the posters will say, as your train pulls into a tunnel and your Teams meeting becomes a black screen with “connection lost” in white text.

The most absurd part is that this actually works. People will buy it. Millennials especially will convince themselves that being unreachable for two hours is a form of self-care, not a failure of basic service delivery. Productivity coaches will write LinkedIn posts about the “unexpected benefits of train travel disconnection.” Someone will launch an app that gamifies your offline time. A startup will raise $40 million to “curate the offline experience.”

Meanwhile, passengers will continue to pay full fare for trains that do not work, with Wi-Fi that does not exist, while being told they are the problem for expecting either to function.

Ofcom’s research is technically correct. It is also completely useless. A report that confirms what everyone knows but changes nothing is not research — it is theatre. Regulatory agencies exist to create the appearance that someone is paying attention while nothing gets fixed. The report will be filed. A press release will be issued. Train companies will promise to “explore solutions.” Nothing will change. Next year, Ofcom will release the same report with slightly different numbers, and we will all pretend this is progress.

The signal-free train experience is not a feature. It is a business model. It is what happens when the cost of solving a problem exceeds the political will to solve it. And because we have collectively decided that accepting failure is easier than demanding better, it will become the norm.

By 2028, poor train connectivity will be so normalised that suggesting it could be fixed will sound naive. “That is just how trains work,” people will say, the same way they say it about airport Wi-Fi and hotel internet. Entire industries will be built on the assumption of disconnection. Travel journals will become fashionable again. People will brag about not checking email for six hours.

Ofcom has given us permission to stop expecting better. Train companies are running with it. And passengers — tired, connected, desperate — will accept it as the cost of getting to work.