Would you, could you, on a bus?

June 19th, 2007 at 4:47 pm (Technology, Web)

I’m on a shuttle bus from Portland to Corvallis, OR. No, really, I’m on a bus right now. When I got on the bus, I noticed a plaque that reads: “Free wireless internet is available on the bus.” On the bus? And free, no less? I know wireless access is being provided these days on planes, at least for those long international flights. But bus-access is a new one on me. (And the airlines definitely don’t offer access for free.)

I couldn’t resist doing a speed test on this link (courtesy speedtest.net, which was the first hit on google and has an awfully slick interface). The result was 785 kbps down, 83 kbps up — not too shabby!

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4 Comments
2 of 4 people learned something from this entry.

  1. Josh said,

    June 19, 2007 at 5:05 pm

    (Knew it already.)

    Well maybe not that shuttle bus exactly, but I’ve seen this before. The bus line in Blacksburg announced sometime last year they were rolling something out like this, modeled after a similar idea at other universities. First buses, soon…. everywhere!

  2. stough said,

    June 19, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    (Learned something new!)

    Very, very cool. I’m at the ESRI Users Conference in San Diego and my WiFi experience is quite good with free wireless at both my hotel and the conference site. Yay for the age of ubiquitous wireless!

    Cheers,
    Tim.

  3. LearningNerd said,

    June 20, 2007 at 10:33 am

    (Learned something new!)

    Nice! I just love wireless internet! They’re planning to have free wifi all across San Francisco, and now I wanna move there.

  4. Iain said,

    July 15, 2007 at 7:13 pm

    (Knew it already.)

    Two years ago I used my cell phone as a modem (GPRS/EDGE). What is really awesome is not being dependent on having local free wireless stuff around. Speeds were slow (typically

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