Free Wi-Fi On Buses Offers A Link To Future Of 'Smart Cities'

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Board any city bus in Portugal's second-largest municipality, Porto, and you've got free Wi-Fi. More than 600 city buses and taxis have been fitted with wireless routers, creating what's touted as the biggest Wi-Fi-in-motion network in the world. The service not only provides commuters with free Internet connections but it also helps collect data that makes the municipality run more efficiently. The fiber network is owned by the city -- put in place about 10 years ago to allow public health centers to communicate digitally. The concept here is to offload data traffic from 3G and 4G cell networks and use this public Wi-Fi instead. That's a shift that could hurt telecom carriers in the long term. In Porto, free Wi-Fi has become a public utility, rather than a commercial commodity. Veniam sells the city Wi-Fi routers, and a monthly subscription. Citizens get free Wi-Fi, without having to drain their mobile data plans. In return, the city gets a host of data collected by the Wi-Fi routers from a network of sensors planted around town. Veniam CEO João Barros says future "smart cities" will rely on this type of Wi-Fi data exchange.


Free Wi-Fi On Buses Offers A Link To Future Of 'Smart Cities'