A pilot is now under way at one of Arizona’s school districts, where a couple of school buses are being equipped with an innovative Wi-Fi technology, allowing students to log into the Internet and start their homework while on route. For years, students at this district, outside Tucson, not unlike millions of students in the US, endured hours commuting to and from school, often breaking the tedious drive by teasing, flirting, talking, fighting and shouting, sometimes displaying rowdy behavior. However, since the fall, when the school district started the pilot, Wi-Fi access has transformed what was often a boisterous bus ride into a rolling study hall, and behavioral problems have virtually disappeared. District officials got the idea for wiring the bus during occasional drives on school business to Phoenix, two hours each way, when they realized that if they doubled up, one person could drive and the other could work using a laptop and a wireless card. They wondered if Internet access on a school bus would increase students’ academic productivity, too. Internet buses may soon be hauling children to school in many other districts, particularly those with long bus routes. The company marketing the router, Autonet Mobile, says it has sold them to schools or districts in Florida, Missouri and Washington, D.C. The technology is based on a router appliance, include a firewall, DSCP, a web-filtering service – design to filter out content on demand (violence, gambling, porn) that is installed on any vehicle, the link to the Internet is provided by either Win-Max or 3G uplinks. The throughput of the system is about 400-800 MBPS on 3G, less on Edge networks. The router costs about $400 and there is a monthly service contract ($60 for 5GB of data).
March 30th, 2011 at 8:35 pm
This is the blog about the bus Web