Roland Perry wrote:
In message , at 23:12:16 on
Thu, 6 Dec 2018, Richard remarked:
Its a reasonably important service

I'm not convinced it is. While it's very nice to know when the next bus
is along the vast majority of London bus routes are frequent enough that
you can just wait for a while for the next to turn up.

Not essential, but I think a more important requirement of the system
is for the bus operators and TfL to know where the buses are. And if
the buses are also using O2... Certainly there was no real-time for
my bus this morning.

It's unfortunate that the case-study the BBC News has chosen for this
outage is the TfL bus information - perhaps because one of their
journalists noticed it at first hand, or maybe they think their readers
could relate to it.

In truth it's one of the least important services to be affected by the
outage, which has the potential (in a future scenario) to ground half
the country's self-driving cars, or cause half of commuters to be unable
to use their m-ticketing application.

Do any self-driving cars depend, or plan to depend, on continuous, reliable
access to a data network? It sounds most improbable. How would they
operate at all on remote roads with no signal?

They will need periodic access to update their mapping data, report back to
base, or update software, but shouldn't need continuous access.