Transperth trailing WiFi through Telstra
I’ve always been a huge supporter of Transperth. In comparison to all the other public transport networks in Australia, Transperth seems to offer the best value for money when it comes to something that a lot of us take for granted. Their network is mostly efficient, clean, has a good coverage of the Perth suburbs and always had a great vision with its online services. Transperth was the first public transport company in this region to release their schedule data for use in 3rd party apps like Google Maps and now it seems like Perth’s public transport system is about to launch TransperthNet, its own WiFi network.
This afternoon I jumped on the 99 circleroute bus to do some errands. Half way through the trip I realised that the female voice that you normally hear on Transperth trains was also on this bus, announcing bus stop names. I looked up and noticed two LCD screens had recently been installed, displaying the time and route information.
Spiffy! I thought to myself and I went about my business.
With only a few minutes left in my trip, I wondered how the on-board computer could have obtained the data to display to their passengers – was it via the mobile network or perhaps via WiFi when the bus was at the depot. Curious grum had to find out. I didn’t have my laptop with me but I did have my iPod. A quick scan revealed the SSID of “TransperthNet” on an unsecured connection.
This was rather odd so I jumped on and in 10 seconds my iPod chimed with 3 new eMail notifications – OMG! An Internet connection!
I only had about 5 minutes to play with the network as my stop was rapidly approaching so I couldn’t do much with the time I had but I was on for long enough to determine that it was fast enough to check eMail/Twitter but it didn’t feel as fast as a standard 3G connection. There was no splash-screen authentication and no actual confirmation that this was a Transperth trail (aside from the SSID). I’ll be hunting that damn bus down next week armed with a laptop to see what else I can find.
So far Perth has free WiFi in several public places, including a bus stop thanks to the folks at Vivid Wireless. Over the last few months I’ve heard strong rumours from a number of reliable sources that the success of these existing WiFi networks have leveraged the introduction of a larger WiFi network throughout Perth, due to be launched in the next 18 months – could TransperthNet be it? Or will be we seeing something even better?
Whatever the future holds for us in Perth, thank you WA government and now don’t screw this up.
21/12/2010 EDIT: Seems they screwed up. A month ago I sent Transperth an eMail only to receive a response today (nice quick customer service there). The response I got was:
“Transperth did trial in for a period on the Circle Route but found it was not viable to continue.”
Not viable? Was it because nobody used it? Might have something to do with the fact that nobody knew it was there in the first place. Lame.