Wi-RAN and Beyond

Community on The Road

To create a useable environment for community that travels along with a vehicle, you have to have supporting hardware, bandwidth, and content.  Hardware is relatively easy.  More expensive than consumer stuff, it must be ruggedized, one of the lessons learned from the first iteration of Wi-RAN.  Bandwidth continues to be an issue, less so for coverage now, more so for price/performance ratio.  The last part is the content and the environment for content.  I'm looking for innovators in this space to create an attractive place that aggregates riders around the transit provider, differentiating them from other modes of transport, specifically the Single Occupant Vehicle, making the bus or train more attractive than a person's own car.    Triplife.com looks like it may have some possibilities in that area.

Rolling Wi-Fi oases as cures for boredom

Wi-RAN is moving beyond simply connecting users to the internet on Mass Transit, whether they be buses or trains to becoming community servers, providing stored content and local apps to people with time to kill, which is typically a ride of more than 45 minutes.  The local server part is necessary, because the mobile broadband experience is deficient, and will be for the business plannable future. We're looking for new and at existing apps to connect travelers on the same vehicle with each other, on both an asynchronous discovery basis "Who else on this bus wants to play cards?", and knitting the regulars together, in a book clubbish kind of way.  If you think you have an app that suits this model, let us know about it via plunkman at cedx dot com.