Edinburgh – Buzz Bus

Edinburgh Council has a new “open access” youth facility, The Buzz. The Council, together with the police and several voluntary organisations, supported by Lottery funding, seek to promote health and to deliver education to youth groups.

Games, music production and sporting activities will be the initial draw for youngsters to The Buzz. This will allow them to be exposed to health and other messages while they are on The Buzz. The key advantage of The Buzz is that it can go wherever youth groups are meeting.

Further plans for The Buzz include income generation through IT training and from renting the vehicle for conferences.

Setup

A bus was equipped with laptops, a plasma screen, discothèque turntables and an awning for sunny days

Inside The Buzz we networked together 5 laptops. They were linked on both wired and wireless LANs, allowing them to share the Internet access. This gave access to all the information stored on the Internet, making it a virtual library. It also enabled it to offer IT-delivered training courses on any subject.

BrownstoneIT was selected to supply and install the mobile satellite Internet access dish, and to configure the LANs.

Our dish is fully automatic in operation using instruments such as GPS, tilt, skew and signal strength to peak on the correct satellite. It also incorporates safety sensors such that, if the vehicle moves, it automatically stows.

It delivers high speed bandwidth to give Internet connectivity to The Buzz.



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