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UC San Diego
Unveils World’s First Bus
The broadband wireless
bus dubbed the CyberShuttle combines a fully mobile 802.11b wireless local
area network inside the bus, with Web access through QUALCOMM’s CDMA2000
1xEV wireless wide area data network installed on the UCSD campus and
at the company’s San Diego headquarters nearby. Our students and faculty
are getting a taste today of wireless technology that most of the world
will not be using until years from now, said Elazar Harel, the university's
Assistant Vice Chancellor for Administrative Computing and Telecommunications
(ACT). This bus is one of the first places where we’ll be able to experiment
with technical as well as social aspects of third-generation (3G) wireless
services in a real-world environment.
The commuter bus
shuttles students, faculty and visitors between the main UCSD campus in
La Jolla, CA, and the Sorrento Valley train station. The trip typically
takes 15-20 minutes, enough time for commuters to check email or surf
the Web. Passengers can also watch streaming video or listen to high-fidelity
music, because they are connected to the Internet in a dedicated 1.25
MHz channel at speeds up to 2.4 Megabits per second—many times faster
than conventional “wired” access using 56K modems. “The campus already
has 1,200 users registered to use 802.11, and all of them can just as
easily log on while riding the bus,” said Greg Hidley, head of technology
infrastructure for Cal-(IT)2 and director of Engineering Computing for
the Jacobs School. To use their laptops or personal digital assistants
online, all they need is the same wireless card they use elsewhere on
campus, and they are automatically handed off from the local network,
through the 1xEV network, to the Internet.
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UCSD
is already operating a large production 802.11b wireless network on campus,
and its faculty and staff have been testing QUALCOMM’s 1xEV technology
for about two years. We are very excited about this initiative and are
thankful to QUALCOMM and to all UCSD participants for their contribution
to the project, Harel added.
The
CyberShuttle is part of an ongoing initiative undertaken by ACT, UCSD’s
Irwin and Joan Jacobs School of Engineering, and the California Institute
for Telecommunications and Information Technology [Cal-(IT)2]. Thanks
to QUALCOMM, we have access to the most advanced wireless network in the
world, noted Ramesh Rao, a leading wireless expert and director of the
UCSD division of Cal-(IT)2. Now we are tapping into that network, and
encouraging our researchers and industry partners to develop new services
and technologies that lead to anytime/anywhere high-speed access to the
World Wide Web.”
