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Imagine T buses as WiFi hot spots
By adamg on Thu, 12/04/2014 - 10:13am
ZipCar founder and current MassDOT board member Robin Chase has started a new company that aims to equip vehicles - such as buses and garbage trucks - with WiFi gear. Business Insider reports on her new company's ideas for "a network of moving things," which in addition to providing roving WiFi service would also allow creation of citywide sensor networks to, well, sense things for the coming Internet of Things.
Via The Transit Wire.
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Comments
Interesting thought
So, if you are waiting for, say, the #1 bus, you would have no wifi most of the time, and massive bandwidth that once-in-an-hour when all three buses went by?
:)
cute
two things..
1. Why do I think this is some what of a conflict of interest? MassDOT board member wants to put wifi devices that their company creates on MassDOT vehicles? HMMM
2. Waste of resources. On a bus? I'd rather seem them built into bus shelters like NYC is doing with old pay phones. Would be better served that way.
But honestly do we need more wifi? everyone and everyone's brother has a smart phone now with cellular service. And the T has improved service underground. Do we really need MORE wifi devices?
Plus I can't imagine the quality of it being very good. Too many users streaming movies would just kill it. And if we're going to 'just check email or light web browsing', we can't use our cellular plan for this for that 1-2MB that will be used?
Edit: and honestly 99% of these roving hot spots (think commuter rail's network) is just a mobile phone connection shared. Nothing much more than that (although they often have two or three radios bonded together to give better bandwidth) so why is using this wifi over using my own, non-shared, data network? (it's not btw)
The commuter rail has it, and
The commuter rail has it, and as someone who uses the bus system, many bus trips can be 45 minutes to a hour, as long as many riders trip on the commuter rail. Is it so terrible to think that bus riders might have the same services as commuter railers?
Most likely the largest wifi
Most likely the largest wifi use will be for a laptop. There's barely enough room to fit a human on a bus as it is, let alone laptop use. Also that's a pretty easy theft target.
I think this wifi is more
I think this wifi is more meant to provide two things.
1. Internet Access for the vehicles themselves so they can use commodity hardware in situation for thing. If you have a network of sensors spread across the bus or garbage truck for things like load leven and functionality and the like and then can use COTS wifi chips to send that data around.
2. Internet Access for distributed mesh networks. Similar to the on vehicle concepts if there disrupted sensors are on things like bus stations and trash cans and stop lights. They can hold their data until the next bus shows up and then offload it. Again this way they can use COTS Wifi chips and not more exotic options.
I think the the Wifi for bus riders is just something to make people support the idea.
Read the article
Boston is not one of the cities they listed as potential first users. But, yeah, if the T dies get interested, one would hope they'd put it out to bid.
Comcast
What I find annoying is now that Comcast has turned most people's home wifi networks into public wifi networks, when I walk down the street my phone is constantly hung up on some weak wifi signal, so I basically don't have internet access for stretches when I leave the house. Now it will happen whenever a bus goes by unless I disable wifi or forget the network after every time I use it. Joy. #firstworldproblems
That said, I really wish the iPhone had an option to have wifi shut off if the accelerometer is activated for more than a few seconds, thus negating this issue, but that's another story altogether.
Complaints aside, I should be happy that I won't have to use data when I'm riding in a garbage truck. This is an idea whose time has come.
YES!!!
Yes, when I was in Ptown over the summer, my cell phone just blows there (T-Mobile's closest tower is in Wellfleet.. across the harbor! so service is dismal if you are not right on the water).. so I used 'xfinitiywifi' and my comcast login. Worked great up and down Commercial Street.
But once I got home, it would connect to every g-d weak signal it could find. Even usurping my home's own wireless connection. Yeah that SSID quickly got deleted.
Now I just shut off wireless until I get to my destination (i.e. work where there is free wifi)
To Stop That Behavior, Just Turn Off "Ask To Join Networks"
That is not the issue
I have that shut off. Comcast's wifi uses one SSID, so if you used it at a cafe across town, it's the same as the one on the 15 houses you pass by on any street you walk down. You can only stop this from happening by shutting off wifi or having it forget the (gigantic) network. I've had to opt for the latter. Same thing happens with the Starbucks network.
I shut off Ask to Join Networks years ago because it's the worst thing ever getting prompted over and over if I want to join some weak signal that will drop 15 seconds later (well, after hanging for a bit).
Oh, I See ... Well, It's Just Another Reason Not To Use Comcast
Using the same SSID everywhere is bound to cause problems.
AT&T does the same
I just set my phone not to connect to that SSID (which I can override of I for some reason do wish to connect) and it no longer tells me it's there or tries to connect.
you misunderstand the issue.
you misunderstand the issue.
you join the xfinity network on occasion to use wifi when you're out. If you don't do "forget this network", your phone will forever be trying to connect to random xfinity hot spots all over town.
Or you could just not leave
Or you could just not leave wifi turned on when not at home or someplace else you intend to use it.
I have an android phone rather than an iPhone, but I can turn wifi on or off right from the status bar, and T-Mobile even has their own thing that can automatically turn wifi back on when it detects your home network.
Your phone constantly searching for wifi signals drains your battery faster anyway, so it's smart to just turn wifi off when you're not intending to use it.
Side note - I quickly disabled that public wifi thing Comcast did. They give you the option of disabling it for your router.
How about we skip the wifi
How about we skip the wifi and just get the buses to run on time and stop breaking down?
Well put
Enough with these silly gimmicks. That's the message we should be sending to the proponents of this nonsense!
You're missing the point
The whole point is to distract you from the fact they can't get the buses to run on time.
It's a great business move.
It's a great business move. The Internet of Things is going to be huge. This is just one small piece in the puzzle.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things
ugh
Yes because its important that my refrigerator talks to the light bulb in my living room which talks to my watch which talks to my home stereo which talks to my car's infotainment system which talks to my blender which talks to my vacuum which talks to my water heater which talks to dishwasher which talks to my cats collar which talks his pet food dish which talks to my washing machine........
Just want we need more drugs erm I mean internet for our addicted minds and gives the data miners to know what I have in my refrigerator or whats washing in my dishwasher or what my cat is eating or how fast my car is going or what else may be this.
As a security person, I can't see this being a good thing. We can barely protect our tablets and PCs, so now you want to open up every appliance or thing to hackers. No thanks.
Every day we're becoming more and more like "The Net"
(and folks before you jump down my sh*t.. this is all IMHO)
Which then shares it all with
Which then shares it all with Google and posts it on facebook.
SOON:
Overwatch Stasi analytics v2.0 indicate anti-citizen behavior. Report to local civil protection for reeducation at Nova-prospekt
More things
Sensors in all your trash cans to notify you when getting full (like Big Belly), razor to tell you its getting dull, bathroom scale to update your fitness app to track your weight and remind you when not checked, toothbrush to monitor frequency and duration of brushing, soap bars and shampoo etc. to notify when running out (like all other consumables).
GPS position transmitters and video cameras on buses are good enough for now.
I agree wholeheartedly
This is little more than a ploy for VC money.
Look at WiFi on Commuter Rail. In 2008 this was huge—the iPhone, remember, had only been out for a few months at that point, and early data speeds were not great. Tethering? Not so much. But now if I'm on a train at rush hour, it's faster for me to use my own device to tether if I want to get any work done. (Similarly on buses and Amtrak, it's usually more reliable to use my own phone.)
Now, why do vehicles need this level of wifi? On a bus, for the most part, a customer doesn't have that much time to find a seat, sit down, take out their computer and connect. (Sure, maybe on an express bus or the 70 or something.) But most people have their own phones and can tether if they need to. Long-distance buses already have wifi, short distance buses don't really need it. (And creating a mobile network of wifi, really? That's what we have cell phones and antennas for. I do miss the days when no one password-protected their home networks—I remember checking email at a red light in Montreal in 2004, on my laptop!—but that time has passed.)
This is totally different from cell antennae in the tunnels. I remember the first time riding the Red Line in Cambridge when you could reliably get cell service the whole way through. That's a huge deal: for productivity (checking email) but also transit connectivity (checking the next departure of the 71 at Harvard and deciding whether to run or amble). But if you have a phone that can do that, you don't need wifi, just use the fact that it's a smart phone.
As for connecting the buses, I think we've done that already. Every bus has GPS, and it uploads the information to the cloud (well, to NextBus) and NextBus spits back the time until the next bus, and the driver has a module that tells them how early or late they are running, and the route sign automatically updates based on the run the bus is assigned to and where it is, etc. What is wifi going to add?
I mean, sure, I guess, data, but don't the buses already have data? You can scrape positions every minute (I know of several people already doing this) and that creates a lot of data. I guess Data, it should be capitalized. Their big claim is that "from a cellular network to free WiFi in a moving vehicle fast enough without Veniam’s technology." And, yeah, that's sort of a pain when your phone picks up on a wireless network while you're on a bus, but it's weak, so a web page won't load (I get this whenever I'm on a bus riding through MIT; it tries to connect to the network, which the phone knows because all of MIT has public wifi, but then the bus moves and it drops it) but the solution here is to turn off wifi for the duration of the trip. A nuisance? Yeah, I guess. But do we need millions of dollars invested to make it better?
Maybe we should just make the buses go faster …
AdamL?
OK, well I guess we can never say that we don't know you from Adam...our esteemed host, that is.
But is this really the Internet of Things?
My conception of the term is that a bus uses the Internet to report location, ridership, and other data in real time (presumably for use in routing decisions). That's not WiFi, though, which implies that the bus is a medium for communication, rather than an active participant. I can see utility in a connected bus or trash truck. I can see some purpose in onboard WiFi for a bus, though not much, since most mobile devices don't need it. I cannot for the life of me understand why a trash truck as roaming hotspot is useful. A trash truck that reports tonnage, percentage of route completion, analyzes contents and reports to the dump likely special handling requirements, that's useful. A trash truck that I follow around for free Internet? That mostly registers a wtf.
Correct. A mobile hotspot is
Correct. A mobile hotspot is not the same thing as the internet of things.
Internet of Things requires connectivity
I can see this as providing intermittent connectivity to sensors or other Things. Maybe you want to put a sensor at each bus stop, but you don't want to install a wifi router at every bus stop. If the buses have wifi, every time a bus drives by, you can upload whatever sensor data you want.
With the Trash truck example, the sensors on the dumpster, or solar powered trash can, or whatever, can upload their data when the truck arrives.
Caveat:
I don't know if this is actually efficient or not (with respect to dollars and power consumption), compared to just giving all the sensors their own low bandwidth cellular connection.
10 years ago they did this
10 years ago they did this for remote villages in Mexico with motor bikes with WiFi that passed thought once a day to exchange all the emails and data requests.
This was before EDGE and functional cell data.
Awesome!
I've always wondered if we could possibly outdo IP-over-carrier-pigeon.
IP-over-MBTA-bus, now with even more delays!
Enough of this Buy your own
Enough of this. Buy your own internet. This is all useless information clogging the airwaves . People have to react to this information as it will seem of importance.I remember when a payphone was all you needed to carry on. Stop this madness now. Garbage trucks and wifi, really, who thinks up this shit.