Nottingham City Transport (NCT) is upgrading to a superfast 4G speed, with its latest group of buses to be fitted with free onboard WiFi.
Thousands of students and university staff were the first to benefit from free WiFi on the Go2 Uni 4, 31 and 34, which began offering the service at the start of the academic year last September. Since then, NCT has rolled out the popular facility on more of its routes, and currently passengers on around a quarter of the fleet (85 buses) are enjoying the benefits of free web access while travelling.
NCT will be fitting a further 55 buses with the technology, and the first route to benefit from a faster 4G WiFi speed will be the Go2 Yellow Line 68 and 69 to Sherwood Rise, Basford, Bulwell and Snape Wood.
WiFi will be provided by CloudUtils, who will install it on 48 buses before Christmas, with the remainder completed by the end of March 2015. After the yellow line, the next route will be the 28 to Beechdale and Bilborough which will be upgraded in September.
“The first bus on our yellow line was fitted yesterday and the remainder will be completed in the next couple of weeks,” explained NCT Marketing Manager, Anthony Carver-Smith. “We’re really excited by the upgrade to 4G – it will give our customers even faster, stronger connectivity, enabling them to Tweet, status update, check our website for travel updates and even download while on the move.
“Since going live last autumn, our WiFi has been used over 265,000 times and is proving extremely popular with our passengers. Feedback shows that they particularly appreciate how easy it is to use. Following a quick, one off registration, it’s easy to connect once you hop on board – and our customers see it as a real benefit when travelling with us.”
Jon Stroud, Head of Vehicle WiFi at CloudUtils, added: “We’re really excited to be working with NCT enabling their fleet with our next generation 4G WiFi and connectivity platform. This will not only to provide WiFi for passengers but also help to improve efficiency in other areas by providing a central hub for on vehicle services and access into our cloud hosted connectivity infrastructure for 24/7 real time remote access.”
