Corporate shuttles
In gridlocked regions, such as the Silicon Valley, corporate shuttle programs are becoming standard perks. Shuttle programs attract top new recruits and can add two or more extra working hours per employee per day. These programs provide great fringe benefits such as eliminating the hassle of driving and also contribute to green initiatives.
To deliver on these business goals, the shuttles require a reliable "office-like" network environment. The ideal mobile-to-Internet solution supports dozens of simultaneous users per shuttle and thousands of simultaneous users system-wide during peak commute hours. The ideal solution allows top engineering talent and other demanding power users to run long-lived server sessions without interruption.
It's a tough challenge to achieve these goals with existing cellular data services.
- Cellular data services today have intermittent connectivity, unreliable connections and variable signal coverage. These issues frustrate users and burden the IT staff with support calls.
- Riders need an "office-like" networking environment. Today's shuttle riders are using host-based and LAN-based applications that require long-lived and persistent connections. Unreliable networking services will prevent many employees from working on the shuttles.
- Mobile environments such as shuttles make "on-site" support nearly impossible to provide. The service window is very small if networking problems arise, which puts tremendous pressure on the IT staff. The network should "just work."
- Existing operations and support team must monitor, diagnose and support complex mobile networking problems. Existing IT tools may not have the capability to diagnose, isolate and resolve networking issues that arise from cellular routers or cellular data service. The only recourse is costly development of new tools and monitoring infrastructure.
- Reports on network utilization and performance are essential for both IT management and shuttle operations. Tracking and building reports on ridership, bandwidth, and application usage is often difficult using a standalone router solution. How will end-to-end data be gathered to determine the overall effectiveness of the program?
- • Provide WiFi Internet access for a group of users
- • Provide WiFi coverage for the entire shuttle
- • Support long-lived sessions to allow top talent to work from the shuttles
- • Maintain low ongoing IT and support costs while delivering solution
- • Provide bandwidth, usage reporting for management justification
- • Provide inventory and positional tracking for logistic planning
- • Positional data is available in real-time and historically in report and raw data formats.
The most common approach to solving this problem is to buy a cellular router. Unfortunately, this leaves you with the burden of finding someone on your staff or finding a reseller partner to build out the solution. You'll also have to figure out how to monitor and support the equipment after the installation, which is often the most challenging and costly part of the solution. How do you achieve the desired benefits without incurring the hidden costs and additional support burden?
Hobnob's solution is designed to provide one of the most reliable and highly available mobile Internet solutions for corporate shuttles providers. Designed with the engineering and user in mind, the primary requirement is to provide an "office-like" network environment on the bus that also has the lowest total cost of ownership. This overriding design goal has resulted in an end-to-end solution that maximizes the benefits to all project constituents: shuttle riders, shuttle operations staff, IT staff and company management.
For information on how Hobnob can help your company, or to arrange for a demonstration, contact us at sales@hobnob.com.
Hobnob XCR-1000
Hobnob LA-WAN
Hobnob MRP