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Their vision for attracting new riders in the US reminds me of MegaBus. I was a big fan of MegaBus when I was in college--they stopped at universities, and had

by mNovak 5y ago

Their vision for attracting new riders in the US reminds me of MegaBus. I was a big fan of MegaBus when I was in college--they stopped at universities, and had clean buses with wifi (supposedly, it never worked), and low fares. I took many a $30 weekend trip to Chicago. I don't know what happened to them, I think they cut a lot of routes.

dopamean 5y ago
I live in Austin and took a Megabus to Houston last year. It was exactly the experience I had in college 16 years ago which was identical to what you described here.
jeffbee 5y ago
Wifi on buses has never made sense to me. It just can't work. It's too technical. Connecting dozens of clients with competing streams over a very narrow and lossy channel simply is beyond the capabilities of all but a very small subset of network engineers, none of whom are working on wifi for buses. Tethering your own mobile to your laptop always works better.
- jessaustin 5y ago
  Do you doubt the capability of wifi to serve fifty passengers, or the capability of the mobile uplink to the cell network? Neither of these strikes me as beyond the capability of readily available hardware. Besides which, on the Greyhound buses I've ridden, most passengers were too busy sleeping, attempting to stay seated given the terrible buffeting of USA-standard interstate highways and bouncy Greyhound suspension, or being too poor to afford a device, to contribute much congestion to the WLAN.
  - jeffbee 5y ago
    Fairness in the presence of congestion is a difficult problem and just slapping some single-board computer with two network interfaces in between wifi and cellular isn't going to work. I don't doubt the ability of wifi to deal with a few dozen stations on the air.
    - jessaustin 5y ago
      I've been on buses (and trains, and airplanes) where the wifi worked, in that I was able to read email and browse the web. It's probably OK if not everyone is streaming 8K video the whole trip? Like many other engineering tasks, the answer may just be to massively over-specify each component.

by mNovak 5y ago

dopamean 5y ago

I live in Austin and took a Megabus to Houston last year. It was exactly the experience I had in college 16 years ago which was identical to what you described here.

jeffbee 5y ago

Wifi on buses has never made sense to me. It just can't work. It's too technical. Connecting dozens of clients with competing streams over a very narrow and lossy channel simply is beyond the capabilities of all but a very small subset of network engineers, none of whom are working on wifi for buses. Tethering your own mobile to your laptop always works better.

jessaustin 5y ago
Do you doubt the capability of wifi to serve fifty passengers, or the capability of the mobile uplink to the cell network? Neither of these strikes me as beyond the capability of readily available hardware. Besides which, on the Greyhound buses I've ridden, most passengers were too busy sleeping, attempting to stay seated given the terrible buffeting of USA-standard interstate highways and bouncy Greyhound suspension, or being too poor to afford a device, to contribute much congestion to the WLAN.
- jeffbee 5y ago
  Fairness in the presence of congestion is a difficult problem and just slapping some single-board computer with two network interfaces in between wifi and cellular isn't going to work. I don't doubt the ability of wifi to deal with a few dozen stations on the air.
  - jessaustin 5y ago
    I've been on buses (and trains, and airplanes) where the wifi worked, in that I was able to read email and browse the web. It's probably OK if not everyone is streaming 8K video the whole trip? Like many other engineering tasks, the answer may just be to massively over-specify each component.