Wifi System acting as a central hub of the onboard communications

When we speak about wifi onboard we are basically thinking about a system able to provide internet connectivity to the passengers, but we many times forgot that many other onboard devices need connection to internet.

Many of the devices installed onboard a bus have adata sim cards installed inside ant it´s vital for their performance to have internet connectivity in order to connect with external applications like monitoring, ticketing, multimedia systems, CCTV and so on. Many time those buses have more than 3 or 4 Sim Cards installed in order to offer connectivity to the onboard devices. The question is ¿ It´s possible to use our onboard Wifi Systems as a central hub of the communications onboard?

The answer is that many of those wifi systems installed onboard are not prepared to offer this service, but we can find in the market advanced solutions which  offer that capabilities achieving great performance in terms of reliability.

When we try to use the wifi Router as a central hub of the onboard communications we face two basic obstacles:

– Some Router manufacturers only allow the internet connection by using the internal modem which has its own sim card. If we have installed onboard a router with this characteristic, we won´t be able to offer it connectivity with our router and it will have to keep working with its dedicated simcard. Luckily there are available in the market many other devices which have installed inside a red Ethernet, so it will be very easy to give them connectivity using our interneet router.

Another important issue to be solved is the following. Many routers of the market can´t separate the traffic generated in the system, so it´s impossible for them manage separately the traffic generated by the onboard devices from the traffic generated by the passengers which are using internet. It´s crucial for the integrity of the system and the information transferred a device able to manage separately all the information, so we have to be sure that the equipment installed onboard has this capability. Today there are routers available in the market which can manage the information separately and this is very important from our point of view.

Another emerging capability which is getting more important because is linked to the multimedia systems installed onboard is the possibility of connecting the bus with some specific wifi networks in order to make massive downloads/uploads of data. Generally the operators have to installed a new device in the bus which will be connected to the wireless network of for example the depot. Once the bus arrives the onboard device connects itself to the wireless network in order to download the required information. Now a days there are solutions available in the market which not only offer internet connectivity to the passengers but also to the devices connected to an external wireless network offering the bus operators great advantages in terms of data management and application accessibility.