Over the past month or so, both in the USA and in Europe I've been a big user of public transportation. Whether it has been a cab, private town car, the light rail or even the underground/metro or subway, I've been taking advantage of whatever mode gets me where I need to go the quickest.
Yesterday I took the CalTrain from San Francisco down to San Jose. I used a 3G connection from AT&T but quickly came to the conclusion, after looking around that the CalTrain folks were missing an added revenue source, and what's more, another reason for more people to give up their car commuting and jump on the rails.
The answer is WiFi on the rails, and the concept which the MBTA in the Boston area has undertaken is clearly one that is on the right track. They use the WAAV router which marries two 3G cards together and creates a wireless cloud for the riders.
This type of approach means shared bandwidth for the riders, and provides them lightweight connectivity for web browsing, email and IM. While I know you can also Skype or SightSpeed over this kind of technology, as I've done that on the Heathrow Express, more importantly, the MBTA provides the framework to let commuters truly be working anywhere.
Comments