Entertaining onboard

With the increasing popularity of WiFi on coaches and buses and rising public expectation, allowing passengers complimentary internet access on the move need not be expensive, as long as operators are aware of the pitfalls, writes John Lewis

No matter whether their journeys are short or long, bus and coach passengers expect to be kept entertained and informed. These days that invariably means that the operator has got to provide a WiFi service – yet another overhead that has to be funded, given that passengers will expect to use it free of charge.

“While onboard WiFi was classed as a passenger luxury up until recently, it’s becoming more and more of a must-have,” said Neil McArthur, UK and Ireland Country Manager at Fält Communications, which offers a mobile Internet of Things platform under the MIIPS banner.

“It’s what people are expecting,” said Corbin Adler, a Director of onboard WiFi provider Mobile Onboard. “It’s becoming standard.”

Stagecoach, Arriva, Blackpool Transport, Nottingham City Transport, Halton Borough Transport, Trent Barton and Cardiff Bus are among those operators which have adopted WiFi with alacrity on some or all of their vehicles.

A random example; during the past year the last-named fleet has invested £1.5m in putting 10 new ADL Enviro200 MMC single-deckers on the road complete with 4G WiFi – the fourth generation of broadband cellular network technology – using equipment sourced from Icomera. Also fitted are a next-stop announcement system provided by Hanover Displays and USB charging points.

WiFi is a must-have that can be expensive to provide however, given the cellular data costs associated with offering internet-based services; especially if travellers decide to watch lots of feature films on their mobile devices on a long journey. As a consequence, operators may have no choice but to impose a limit on each device to hold down costs and ensure that everybody onboard enjoys equal access to the service.

“WiFi can consume anywhere from 5% to 10% of your operating profit,” said Sam Glover, CEO and Founder at LetsJoin. “The big networks have realised that data SIMs are the way they make their money and they want to maximise their income,” added Corbin.[wlm_nonmember][…]

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Minimising costs

There is another way of keeping those costs under control, according to Sam – store the content you believe people would like to see on your vehicle. “We offer an onboard software platform that can be used to host, manage and distribute it,” he said.

Download one piece of content to this platform – a film, a catch-up TV show or a game for example – and all the passengers can access it without extra data costs being incurred. If they download exactly the same content individually from a remote location using the bus or coach’s WiFi, then the firm’s data costs will rise sharply.

According to Sam, adopting this approach deals with another problem with onboard WiFi: “You don’t have a long cable running behind the vehicle, so the signal can be intermittent and unreliable. Host the content onboard and you are creating an onboard intranet. That makes disruption to whatever passengers may be watching far less likely. It also means the service they get is really fast.”

Neil agreed: “It’s all quite similar to what’s available on an airliner on a long-haul flight.”

Icomera’s Head of Product and Marketing, Paul Barnes, said that in his view the bus and coach industry has reached a point where the onboard WiFi experience is in fact “very good.”

“The quality is there and you can stream videos and access your emails,” he added. “It’s the cost of data over the cellular network that’s the problem.”

“Onboard systems tend to be very stable,” said Darren Maher, Business Communications Manager at 21st Century Technology. “The access points are ruggedised and everything is designed for transport applications. They have to be, given that passengers on, say, a double-decker may be making anywhere between 60 or 80 or more simultaneous connections.”

He agreed that the price of data is the key issue and strongly advises operators to opt for a managed WiFi package that ensures data usage is capped. It is a service 21st Century can offer alongside the supply, installation and maintenance of the necessary hardware.

“Data tariffs are coming down all the time but you can still get caught out,” he said. “You don’t want to exceed whatever it is you’ve signed up for.”

Darren cites the example of an operator with 10 buses or coaches whose tariff has been calculated on the basis that its fleet will use 100 gigabytes of data a month. “The cost will be quite low and usage will be averaged out across all the vehicles,” he observed.

Given that a gigabyte equates to around one-third to one-half of a film however, those 100 gigabytes will soon be consumed, he pointed out.

It is then that the data company will start to make money. “They profit out of what are known as ‘overages’. It’s rather like banks making money out of unauthorised overdrafts,” he explained.

“Depending on the tariff you are on, you could be charged anywhere from £6 per additional gigabyte to several hundred pounds. It can all get incredibly pricey very quickly and the last thing you want is to be hit with a massive bill just because you had a lot of passengers who wanted to watch last night’s X Factor.”

Negotiating the tariff that is right for your business, then managing data usage thereafter will ensure this does not happen – and a flexible approach can be adopted.

“In the rush hour when data demand is high on buses, you may want to impose tighter limits than during the rest of the day when your buses aren’t quite so busy,” he said.

“At Mobile Onboard we can manage data in such a way that the operator will not incur any additional charges 99.99% of the time,” Corbin said.

Providing onboard hosted content gives customers the choice of either watching what is on the vehicle or using the WiFi to, say, look at their social media pages, send and receive emails or for general browsing. What is decorously referred to as ‘inappropriate material’ can be filtered out, according to 21st Century.

If the onboard content is sufficiently appealing, then they are likely to make full use of it, so data costs should come down.

“What you’re doing is freeing up internet bandwidth, thereby giving passengers who need to use it a better experience,” said Paul. “You can then relax some of the data restrictions you may have put in place.”

If you decide to host your own content, then how do you determine what to provide? A lot depends on the demographic of the passengers and the length of the trip. “There is little point in offering an entire box set if it is less than an hour-and-a-half, but what is really important is to change it regularly,” Sam remarked.

“You don’t want to have the same 30 films there for weeks on end, especially on a service that the same people use frequently.”

Paul agreed: “If a coach customer is sitting there for two or three hours, then he or she will have plenty of time to watch a feature film. If they are taking a 20-minute bus ride to work however, then they may decide to watch half an episode of a TV series on the way there, and half on the way back.

“Having WiFi on board allows you to refresh the content remotely without having to physically visit each vehicle.”

Stressing the importance of enlisting the help of a specialist content provider, Paul said: “We do a lot of work with Whoosh Media.” It provides films, TV series sourced from NOW TV and Amazon Prime, news, audio books, e-books, sport and music. Other potential providers that have found favour across the industry include Filmbankmedia. It has over 12,000 films from Miramax, MGM, Warner Brothers, Twentieth Century Fox, Disney and Sony Pictures among others on its books, with more in the pipeline soon to be made available. They include ‘Paddington 2’ and ‘Film Stars Don’t Die In Liverpool’ (both highly recommended by the way, albeit for different reasons). Filmbankmedia’s TV content includes ‘Breaking Bad.’

Content suppliers and their intermediaries skirt carefully around the topic of how much such content is likely to cost operators in hard cash. However, it will not necessarily involve all that much expenditure, according to Paul because the businesses that deliver the content to the provider are likely to treat it as an opportunity to market what they have to offer to a captive audience.

“A passenger may, for example, be allowed to watch the first few episodes of a series free of charge, and then asked to take out a subscription if he or she wants to view the rest,” he said.

Sourcing content from a reputable provider should mean that you do not become entangled in any licensing issues affecting the public showing of films and TV programmes. Failure to comply with licencing requirements could land you in legal hot water.

One business that has opted wholeheartedly for onboard content is National Express. It is offering it on all of its coaches and selected longer bus routes as VUER; View, Unwind, Enjoy, Relax. All travellers need is the requisite app on their smartphones and tablets.

The vehicles are equipped with Icomera’s M4X mobile access and application router which delivers content from GoMedia.

“With coach tickets from just £5 single and magazines, film and TV thrown in for free, we believe VUER enables us to offer truly unbeatable value to customers,” said National Express MD Tom Stables, with pardonable enthusiasm.

According to Paul, some content providers do not require an app to be downloaded – that is the situation with Whoosh Media.

Whoosh can give travellers access to 50 hours of NOW TV shows through their browsers on all devices, along with a variety of other content including e-books, audio books and magazine articles from the likes of Penguin Random House and Hearst Magazines.

Data

“The use passengers make of the service can tell you a lot about them and their interests,” said Paul. “So far as buses are concerned it can also tell you when and where they got on and got off.”

Some of that data is of course already available through the operator’s ticketing system. The infotainment package can be another useful source of knowledge however, and can be of assistance if the bus and coach company wants to sell advertising space around the content.

“You can tell potential advertisers that passengers regularly catch the bus at a particular stop and use it to travel to an out of town retail park for example,” Sam said. “They then have the opportunity to send vouchers to travellers’ handsets which they can redeem there and then in certain shops. From the passengers’ viewpoint, it means they are getting a real benefit from using the bus. That’s something they are sure to welcome.”

Downloadable vouchers can be generated for tourist attractions too. Hosted content can include videos of the destinations passengers are heading for plus videos of other destinations they may care to visit; and to which the operator concerned happens to run tours.

A better understanding of the use travellers actually make of services can also provide useful additional ammunition if a service has to be re-routed and local residents groups launch a campaign against the decision, he added.

To make WiFi work the vehicle has to be equipped with the necessary physical hardware, including of course a router. Prices vary considerably depending on what the customer wants.

“Mobile Onboard can provide a basic hardware solution for £350 or so but that can rise to £1,000 at the premium end of the scale,” said Corbin. “We design and build it ourselves – we’re not just box shifters, we employ our own technical team – and we’ve got our own software.

“However, we recognise that the hardware is all that some customers require so everything we do is provided on an open-platform basis. That gives them complete freedom.

“We also offer BeamCARE, a full service support package,” he said. As well as a lifetime hardware warranty, it includes a 24/7 online helpdesk plus remote management and diagnostics.

More than WiFi

The units installed by suppliers can be used for a lot more than keeping passengers amused. “What we offer is modular and we can always add more functionality,” Corbin said.

“Ours costs around £600 and the operator can also use it to access CCTV images, ticketing information and tachograph data among other things that he can view remotely,” said Neil.

“You don’t need half a dozen units scattered around the vehicle,” he added. “You only need one, with a single SIM card.”

“WiFi is increasingly being installed as part of a connected system and at the same time as all the other technology on the vehicle is being upgraded,” said Darren. “It appears along with the latest CCTV, the latest passenger counter and so on.”

Upgrade everything simultaneously and you do not have to take the bus or coach off the road two or three times for different pieces of work to be done.

Getting key pieces of technology installed at the same time was the approach Widnes, Cheshire-based Halton Borough Transport took when it asked 21st Century to install passenger WiFi and HD IP (High Definition Internet Protocol) CCTV cameras in all 77 of its vehicles. The CCTV system is able to make use of the Falt Communications’ MiiPs platform.

21st Century is especially well-placed to install a fully-integrated CCTV and passenger WiFi system says Darren because it is a member of ITxPT; Information Technology for Public Transport. It is an initiative to make all systems on Europe’s buses work across a single Ethernet-based backbone to allow plug-and-play connectivity.

Hosting high-definition films requires a lot of storage capacity. “A WiFi router plus a media server with the amount of storage you are going to need could cost you anywhere from just under £1,000 to up to £3,000,” said Paul.

More capacity is likely to be needed in future with the advent of 4K video. “That’s going to mean far larger file sizes,” he said.

Corbin agrees that sufficient storage is a must: “However, I don’t think 4K is necessary if passengers are going to view a video on a tablet or a smartphone. At the moment, 500 gigabytes will usually hit the spot because users will rotate their content.”

Although they remain available, airline-style screens in the backs of coach seats have never caught on to any great extent because of the expenditure involved, the time it takes to install them and the cost of replacing any that are vandalised. It seems unlikely that many more coach companies will opt for them given that so many people are now equipped with their own smartphones and tablets, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as BYOD (Bring Your Own Device).

Fitting a WiFi router to a vehicle can take as little as half-an-hour, according to Andy Baxter, founder and owner of Coach Multimedia Systems. He said: “All we need to do is connect it to a power source. If the customer wants antennae fitted to the roof however, then obviously that’s going to take a bit longer.”

His company fits everything from radios to USB charging ports, with the latter becoming increasingly popular on both buses and coaches. “We can even install a driver fatigue monitoring system,” he explained.

“You can have your WiFi router and media server in the same box,” said Paul.

Offering WiFi can undoubtedly help you gain and retain customers said Darren, who cites Halton’s experience: “While other operators have seen ridership decline that has not been the case with Halton. It provides passengers with quality WiFi with a stable connection.”

WiFi is unlikely to be the sole reason for a fleet’s ridership remaining on an even keel or rising; ticket prices, a reliable service and the cleanliness and general presentation of the vehicles are other key influencing factors. But it clearly has a significant role to play.

Icomera has been involved in a WiFi initiative that is hopefully prompting passengers in Cambridge to leave the car at home and hop on a bus instead. It involves a service operated by Go Whippet in conjunction with the university and the city council which links Eddington with the rest of the city.

Eddington is home to a development which offers affordable accommodation for university staff as well as for postgraduate students. An Icomera router provides the free WiFi connection and has the ability to cache university web pages for passengers to access. It should perhaps be stressed that the service is available to everybody and is not solely for people with university links.

Based in Prague in the Czech Republic, Passengera is hoping to make inroads into the UK’s bus and coach infotainment sector and has been setting out its stall at exhibitions on this side of the Channel.

“More and more travellers are demanding easy to access onboard WiFi, accurate, reliable information delivered on time and content-based entertainment,” said the company. Passengers who find an infotainment platform they like are more likely to come back to the same operator in future, Passengera contends.

It has already scored domestic success with Umbrella Coach and Buses, which runs long-distance services between Prague and Amsterdam, Brussels, Milan and Dusseldorf, among other activities.

“Since the implementation of what Passengera has to offer we’ve seen a clear increase in customer satisfaction,” said Umbrella CEO, Pavel Steiner. “Thanks to the added value of the package and its flexibility, we’ve been able to get the initial investment back quickly.”

Amid the onward march of onboard BYOD WiFi there is still a market for DVD players and overhead screens. Available through Autosound and Coach Multimedia Systems among others, they too can be used to play videos of the destination and promote the operator’s other services.

Without wishing to denigrate all the technology that is available, spending one’s entire life staring into a screen when the real world is rushing by outside can seem a little pointless. “Sometimes it’s just nice to look out of the window,” said Adler.[/wlm_ismember]