It’s one of the major problems of modern life. Forget losing your trolley pound at the entrance to Asda, forget having a faulty cork on your pinot grigio and forget your Sky Plus not recording an episode of Midsomer Murders.
The team here at Boriswatch Towers have, like you, often been stuck on a London bus and cursed the fact that there’s no high speed wireless broadband so we can do our online banking from the double decker of the number 90.
Well, all that might be about to change. For people across the capital who want to play Angry Birds on the way to work, Transport for London have announced that moves are well under way to install wi-fi on all of London’s buses.
The news comes after the announcement that Transport for London will install Wi-Fi hotspots in as many as 120 Underground stations by June 2012.
And, if being able to by your groceries whilst hurtling down Knightsbridge isn’t enough, bus passengers will also soon benefit from new smartphone applications. Something called ‘bus countdown datasets’ are being released which, in conjunction with an app called iBus (obviously), will rigger messages inside buses about what the next stop is.
Kulveer Ranger from Transport for London explains: “There are 6.5 million journeys a day in London on 8,000 buses. The bus countdown datasets that we are pushing through will become immensely powerful in terms of real time data for transport.”
Once the data is released, application developers will be able to build apps that accurately tell you when your bus will arrive, for example.
So, you’ll know when your bus is coming and you’ll be able to log-on whilst on the top deck. Sounds far too organised to us…