Thought for the day
I was down in the village yesterday.
Naturally I called into the coffee shop.
I hadn’t been there in the last few weeks as there was a nasty wind out that would cut through you for a shortcut and that didn’t bode well for a comfortable mug of coffee on the terrace. Penny was missing her chicken too.
It was very pleasant there yesterday. It was cool but calm so I didn’t need a coat. There was a distinct air of impending spring. A blackbird was singing his head off in a nearby tree and a robin cheerfully cleared crumbs off the next table to mine. I let my mind wander.
Wandering thoughts are nice for clearing mental cobwebs. I meditated on such mysteries such as why Bumble Bees fly in an open door and then bash themselves off windows beside the open door. Yesterday however my meandering thinking came up with a problem that has me baffled. How do buses run their wifi?
Bus services make a point of telling us all that they have free wifi. That fine, but how does it work? To offer wifi they have to have connections to the Interwebs? Are they connected by cable to a central point? I find that hard to believe as they would literally tie traffic up into knots as they trailed cables through the rush hour traffic. That can’t be right.
Do they connect through a satellite? I have never seen a dish on the roof of a bus so that can’t be right either.
Do they use the mobile phone network? I find that hard to believe because mobile reception is pretty iffy around Ireland. I live in a reasonably civilised part of Ireland and I have to go upstairs to get a strong signal. As for 4G? Forget it. 5G? Hahaha!
There is only one possibility. They download the Interwebs onto a disk so it looks like the Interwebs. People happily surf what they think is the Web but in fact are sending Farcebook messages to a disk in the cab of the bus.
And they wonder why they never get replies to their messages?
You missed the obvious answer. Busses are the interwebs. They carry messages between nodes. Why spend all of that money on fiber optics and copper cabling when the busses already are going that way. You messages travel to node near a bus stop. As each bus goes by the messages get uploaded. As buses pass each other they transfer the packets between them. eventually the bus goes by the node next to destination and packet is delivered.
So they next time your internet is slow, its just the bus stuck in a traffic jam.
I was going to say that each bus stop has a repeater in them, a bus is never out of range of a stop! and that also allows for these fancy updating timetables you get on stops nowadays.
But having just read James’s comment, I realise that I’m full of shit, his theory must be right as it explains everything neatly.
You obviously don’t live in my neck of the woods. The habit here is to have clusters of stops and then a mile of so before the next one. In my little corner there are four or five stops. In the village there’s only one. Bus stops seem to be planted with little rhyme nor reason.
Thanks, James. Now I understand why that little USB connection slot relates to a ‘Universal Serial Bus’, it all suddenly makes sense.