Washington State Ferries Expands Wi-Fi Service for Passenger Use

Computerworld - In a development that extends wireless WAN technology beyond fixed locations, Washington State Ferries plans to offer free Wi-Fi service to passengers on ferryboats on its high-traffic Seattle-area routes this fall.

IT director Jim Long said the ferry system recently 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. Long said he would eventually like to have all 25 boats in the 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 connectivity to the Internet available on ferryboats operating anywhere in the area. The Mobilisa tests are being funded by a $1 million grant from the Federal Transportation Administration.

Coverage Configuration

Ludlow said Mobilisa has installed a two-stage wireless system to provide coverage to Washington State Ferries. The first stage provides connectivity from the shore to the boats, with point-to-multipoint wireless gear from Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Proxim Corp. operating in the unlicensed 5.8-GHz band.

Proxim's Tsunami MP11a system supports mobile roaming, which is key to ensuring uninterrupted connectivity from the boats as they move from the coverage area of the fixed-link wireless antennas installed on one side of a route to antennas on the other side. The Port Townsend-Keystone run doesn't allow line-of-sight coverage, so it required the installation of two antennas on the Keystone side, Ludlow said.

Mobilisa also had to develop its own switching algorithms for the handoffs between the fixed-wireless shore stations, so 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; an aircraft carrier blocked the signal on one day.

The Proxim equipment on the boats connects to BeaconPoint Wi-Fi access points from Chantry Networks Inc. in Waltham, Mass. The BeaconPoints offer Wi-Fi connections using the 802.11a standard, which operates in the 5-GHz unlicensed band, and the 802.11b/g standards, which use the 2.4-GHz band.

Mobilisa has also outfitted the ferry docks with Wi-Fi BeaconPoints, allowing passengers to use the service while waiting for a boat. The Port Townsend access point also covers restaurants near the ferry dock, Ludlow said. The BeaconPoints are hooked into Chantry's BeaconMaster wireless switch, which allows Mobilisa to control all the BeaconPoints on all the boats from the Mobilisa network operations center in Port Townsend.