On Sun, 18 Mar 2007 02:40:27 +0000, Marc Brett
wrote:

Another slant on the story here. It's only the signs which are malfunctioning;
the rest of the system seems fine.

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http://www.vancourier.com/issues07/0...033107nn3.html

But the transmitters communicating the locations of buses to the digital signs
hasn't worked well. The communications system was purchased from Siemens, a
major German technology company.

"One of the issues that we've had is that the receivers have a hard time picking
up signals from the buses," Snider said. "There's a lot of radio frequency
interference out there and Siemens tried everything from hardware, software,
firmware-which, I gather is somewhere in between-and after a period of time they
basically abandoned it. They said we can't fix this thing."

Coast Mountain Bus Company, which runs day-to-day operations, relies on bus
drivers, passengers and transit supervisors to report when one of the
approximately 40 digital signs isn't working so staff can reboot it.

"That is one of the weaknesses in the system, that it's not two-way. It won't
tell us automatically when it's not working properly," Snider said.
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From the report, it looks like a transmit-only dedicated radio system supplied
by Siemens. Are the buses actually sending the signals?!?!

In contrast, the TfL web site diagram of iBus indicates that the Countdown
displays will communicate with the Central System via GPRS or ISDN.


Best quote from the article, though, must be this:

"We're quite convinced that the new system will work. Not just work better, but
work," Snider said.

Well yes. Either the spokesperson has no idea what he is talking about
or else someone, somewhere really has no idea how to specify the
requirements for a system like this. Knowledge of the environment in
which such a system is supposed to work is pretty fundamental to
designing it correctly. Given the Siemens system is apparently being
replaced after 5 years the whole article looks like a half hearted
whinge at Siemens when I suspect that there may be other issues like
poor specification, no upgrade path and possibly a decline in
maintenance activity (pending replacement) that could be equally
responsible. I look forward to the link to a newspaper article showing
that the transport authority is suing Siemens.
--
Paul C


Admits to working for London Underground!