Timothy Shannon, director of transportation services at Twin
Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento, California, has overseen the implementation of Wi-Fi throughout the entire fleet, not for the students but to download onboard video rather than using the old way of pulling SD cards. “Tat actually benefits managers and is used to support drivers and student claims in the name of safety,” Shannon says. “We are looking at putting Wi-Fi in our field trip buses so that students can follow an interactive lesson plan on long trips.” Application complexity will rely on new and improved technology to enable more functionality. In order for managers to use it along- side students, the best connectivity technology may be required.
FIBER ON THE GO Technology should improve as faster connection speeds become
available, and school districts stand to benefit. Wi-Fi and 5G cellular networks may merge into a single technology over the next decade. Tis development could truly allow the school bus to become an advanced site of learning. “One of the technical enhancements that I expect will impact
how we connect to Wi-Fi networks is 5G with massive-MIMO based technologies,” says Jay Akin, CEO of Mushroom Networks, Inc., in San Diego. “Early on in the technology cycle of 5G, there will be an opportunity to provide very fast connectivity, think fiber-on-the-go, for moving vehicles, outperforming the mobile
connectivity performance of the handheld of the passengers. However, as 5G moves down to the handset in three to five years, the requirement for a vehicle to provide local internet to passengers will disappear and the networking requirement inside the bus will be replaced exclusively with M2M (machine-to-machine) applications.” Candace Worley of McAfee says that school buses are
increasingly becoming connected via Wi-Fi to the cloud, similar to the evolution seen in passenger cars. Tis allows the network to perform other functions aside from student learning, such as onboard diagnostics that keep track of core maintenance status, tire pressures, and feeding such data back to the operations team. “Wi-Fi also enables things like physical tracking of buses to make sure they are on the right route and are driving at safe speeds,” adds Worley. “Some of these things are already in place and we expect that new uses for Wi-Fi connections on buses will continue to be enabled over time.” Raytown Schools’ Kevin Easly adds that Wi-Fi has the potential
to increase student ridership and provide in-depth GPS tracking and directions as well as enhanced video monitoring through one stream of data. “Students are learning real-world skills in the classroom and Wi-Fi on the bus allows students to expand the classroom and learning opportunities to before and after school hours. In a world where everything is so connected, I think the next logical step for transportation is to catch up.”
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58 School Transportation News • OCTOBER 2017
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