Football Clubs Add Wi-Fi to Their Team Coaches

A UK travel firm which provides luxury coaches for football clubs has equipped its coaches with Wi-Fi services - utilizing Vodafone's HSPA network for the backhaul. The coach kit is being provided by Icomera. 

The Moovbox will allow Premiere League footballers access to the Internet and email on the move, while also enabling Eavesway to communicate with drivers and send operational information such as schedules and itinerary amendments. Lancashire-based Eavesway Travel operates a fleet of twenty-seven Van Hool coaches, of which the Internet-enabled vehicles are branded with the 'Eavesway Exclusive' livery.

Manchester United Football Club (MUFC) has been an Eavesway client since 1999 and, with the arrival of the new Moovbox-equipped team coach, has extended its contract by a further four years.

"The primary purpose of our corporate coaches is the transportation of the Premier League clubs to all their first and reserve team fixtures," said Mike Eaves, Managing Director at Eavesway Travel. "The real-time high-speed communication link provided by Icomera's Moovbox not only offers our passengers the very best on-board Internet facilities, but also gives us the means to manage and operate our fleet more efficiently." As well as serving some of the Britain's top football clubs, Eavesway Travel offers its Internet-enabled vehicles for private hire, working for a number of major corporate customers around the UK. Eavesway operates its Cruiselink services on behalf of P&O and Princess Cruises, transferring passengers to and from the port of Southampton in the south of England.

The Moovbox M200 mobile broadband gateway acts as a bridge between a vehicle and high-speed cellular data networks, providing Wi-Fi access and an Ethernet-based local area network (LAN) for connecting on-board systems such as CCTV, automated announcement, and e-ticketing. Eavesway Travel utilizes Vodafone's 3G HSPA network which offers speeds up to 7.2Mbps.

The Moovbox is a ruggedized industrial-grade Wi-Fi access point and cellular router, offering multiple wide area network (WAN) radios for automatic failover and bandwidth aggregation between carriers, and featuring built-in GPS for real-time positioning.

Posted to the site on 17th March 2009