Washington State Ferries expands ferryboat Wi-Fi service

Computerworld - Washington State Ferries plans to offer free Wi-Fi service to passengers on ferryboats on its high-traffic Seattle-area routes this fall, according to Jim Long, IT director for the ferry system.

Long said the ferry system has just finished testing Wi-Fi service on the M/V Klickitat on the Port Townsend-Keystone route, which connects the Olympic Peninsula to Whidbey Island about 43 miles northwest of Seattle. He said the quality of service "could not have been better."

The ferry system expects to offer the Wi-Fi service on one vessel running from Edmonds, 18 miles north of Seattle, to Kingston on the Kitsap Peninsula in late September, with service planned for the heavily traveled Seattle-Bainbridge Island route in November, followed by the Seattle-Bremerton route in December.

Eventually, Long said, he would like to have all 25 boats in the ferry fleet connected to a wireless WAN that treats each "individual ferry boat like an office building" hooked up to a wired WAN. The fleet carries 26 million passengers per year between 20 ports of call.

That's exactly what Mobilisa Inc., now running a nearly yearlong test of Wi-Fi for Washington State Ferries, is delivering, according to Nelson Ludlow, CEO of the Port Townsend-based company. Mobilisa has installed a wireless WAN that treats about 400 square miles of Puget Sound "like one big WAN," with Wi-Fi service and wireless backhaul to the Internet available on ferryboats operating anywhere in the area. The Mobilisa tests are funded by a $1 million grant from the Federal Transportation Administration.

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Mobilisa also had to develop its own switching algorithms to handle the handoffs between the fixed-wireless shore stations, as the signal from the vessel could bounce from one shore antenna to another throughout its run. Ludlow said Mobilisa experienced few outages in its tests with the Klickitat, which began in April—although an aircraft carrier did block the signal on one day.