Internet Solutions for Public Transport
Manchester is a small town in New York with a population of 60000 with rich heritage, rolling farmlands, and great shopping centers. The majority of the population uses local transit buses to get around. MRRT is the transportation company that runs an efficient fleet of 100 buses across 36 routes. With over 60% of the citizens spending a great deal of time on the road, the city wanted them to stay connected during their travels.
Challenge
When they started evaluating options, they were not sure how to integrate security, scalability, marketing, and customer experience. How will the customer experience the change from one route to another and most importantly what data should be captured that could help market local businesses and directly increase sales. They were looking at a sustainable roadmap to minimize the costs of the IT infrastructure by offering free internet connectivity services across all routes. Luckily for them, our experienced partners KBS Mobility collaborated with T-Mobile in order to formulate a strategic setup to offer seamless connectivity for approximately 36000 daily commuters.
Solution
KBS Mobility designed a solution that consisted of 100 MAX Transit Mini devices, each paired with a 2×2 MIMO Mobility 22G Antenna to offer secure Wi-Fi on the move with LTE.
A one-time commuter registration portal was customized to capture macro-level commuter data required. Once registered, the devices will auto-connect to one of the 100 routers as soon as they come into the vicinity, giving a seamless connection. The captured data would also be used for push advertising via the Captive Portal, increasing foot-traffic and engagement for local businesses, essentially creating a local web-based advertising platform structure.
What makes the MAX Transit Mini suitable for transportation deployments is useful features for on-board connectivity such as GPS tracking and Ignition sense.
Result
Thanks to the experts over at KBS Mobility and T-Mobile, the end result is that high-speed Wi-Fi is offered for free to daily commuters. Efficiency during their journey has increased by at least a calculated 12% increase in productivity. Local businesses were able to promote their own businesses and current promotions such as, discounts and sales.
Deployment
- Deployed in 100 buses covering 36 routes to provide LTE connectivity to daily commuters.
- InControl 2 is included with the PrimeCare subscription, essentially allowing for remote central management of the entire fleet as well as pushing configurations to any and all devices without physically touching the devices.
- The built-in GPS tracking system allows for network insights such as scheduling efficiency.
- Each MAX Transit Mini is paired with a Mobility 22G Antenna.
- 2×2 cellular MIMO for high bandwidth and solid reliability, dual-band Wi-Fi, and GPS.
- The GPS receiver is equipped with high gain LNA, making it ideal for location tracking.