Edinburgh City Case Study

Background

Edinburgh Council has a new youth service strategy offered through the community education service. Edinburgh Young Scot is the agency designated to offer a youth information and discount initiative aimed at young people from 11 to 18.

Edinburgh Young Scot is charged to promote social inclusion, active citizenship and community safety. Starting in November 2003, the Smart Bus will be used as a resource centre visiting schools, youth clubs and local festivals such as the Mela and Fringe Sunday.

The Bus

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

An inside view, showing some of the 8 laptops. They were linked on both wired and wireless LANs, allowing them to share the Internet access. This gave it 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

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 the bandwidth to give Internet connectivity to the Edinburgh Young Scot “Smart Bus”.

Our service is complete, including installation and commissioning. We normally install a month after receipt of order, but we can move more quickly, if needed. In this case, project constraints required us to install the dish just over a week after receipt of the order.

We also offer a help-line for any operational queries.



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