As my Boston-based colleague Barb Darrow can attest, the Acela train commute to NYC can be frustrating if you’re trying to get work done. Amtrak offers free Wi-Fi on its Northeast Corridor (NEC) trains from Washington to Boston, but if it’s a crowded train you’re usually better off bringing your own mobile hotspot – or just taking a nap.

Amtrak wants to change that, though. It hopes to do away with the 3G and 4G cellular network connections it buys from Verizon(s vz), AT&T(s t), Sprint(s s) and T-Mobile(s tmus) (which it then redistributes to passengers via Wi-Fi) and replace them with its own dedicated track-side network, boosting the total capacity it can deliver to a train from 10 Mbps today to more than 25 Mbps.

“We know that our customers want a consistently reliable and fast on-board Wi-Fi experience – something we cannot guarantee today on our busiest trains…