The free Wi-Fi for buses has made a new progress in Beijing. The first batch of 200 buses equipped with upgraded Wi-Fi devices have been officially put into use. Last year, the bus group announced that it would completely disable bus WiFi, and the suspension period was officially lifted from yesterday. It is expected that by September, all 18,000 buses in Beijing will be covered with the upgraded free WiFi signal. Except in Beijing, there are companies all over the country trying to enter the public free wifi market. The ice-breaking of free bus wifi in the Beijing market is expected to bring a new round of bus wifi fever across the country, but is the prospect of bus wifi really that bright?

Do people really need bus wifi?

Yes, now people have indeed lived a life where they need to ask wherever they go, whether there is wifi, and traffic has become an essential necessities of life. However, the author still has doubts, is the travel scene like bus really suitable for the development of wifi business?

Those who need to connect to wifi are often users who travel long distances. Most of the people who choose to travel by bus are basically short-distance travel. The travel time period is basically the commute time. People in first- and second-tier cities should be very aware of how crowded the car is. When not everyone is willing to squeeze into sardines, they will take out their mobile phones to connect. Play games and watch dramas on wifi.

Secondly, the use of bus WiFi requires a certain threshold. In order to staking the public WiFi, it is generally necessary to download the corresponding APP and only after identity authentication can be connected. From downloading the APP to registering and logging in, this is a process with a high threshold for use. If there is only one operator, you only need to download an APP. Fortunately, if different lines of the bus system in a city are operated by different free wifi operators, then there are really so many people who are willing to travel on the bus for more than a dozen people. In minutes or tens of minutes, can you connect to wifi, save only a few megabytes of traffic, and download a bunch of apps on your phone?

And using the upgraded wifi, the experience is not necessarily very good. According to media reports, the current upgraded bus wifi in Beijing, "The new system can satisfy at least 40 people to surf the Internet at the same time, each person can enjoy 400k network speed, the commonly used WeChat, web browsing and other functions are no problem, and watching videos can be satisfied at the same time. Six or seven passengers watched." From this description, we can see that the upgraded wifi actually only stays at the level of single-digit users in terms of supporting video and game experience.

With the continuous construction of smart cities, the coverage area of urban public Wi-Fi has become wider and wider. How big is the living space of bus Wi-Fi in first- and second-tier cities? Coupled with the continuous breakthrough development of 5G technology, full-scale commercial use is just around the corner. Even people in the industry are questioning whether bus wifi will become a transitional product, and no one can guarantee how long its life cycle will be.

Safety remains an issue

For most users, when accessing wifi in public, the most concern is not only whether it is free, but also information security. Although public wifi can bring convenience, it also has huge security risks. There are more and more reports of hackers causing huge losses by providing some free wifi links to steal user information.

Once you use these public wifi, the wifi operator can actually record all the records of your mobile phone use, including the login account and password. Once you use these wifi for transfer or payment business, or use other software to operate, it is very likely that you personal information has been leaked.

Although regular operators do not wantonly steal user information like hackers. However, operating in the state of public wifi and local area network will still provide convenience for some criminals. Especially as our mobile phones are increasingly connected to applications such as Internet finance, payment, and e-commerce, personal home addresses, financial transactions, and identity information are all recorded in these applications. For many users, free wifi in public places is not an option for security reasons.

In terms of security, bus wifi is still unable to win the competition with cellular mobile networks.

However, there is still room for the bus wifi market

According to the data of market research institute Counterpoint, the penetration rate of smartphones in the Chinese market has exceeded 90%. This is already a very high state. And with the development of technology and continuous breakthroughs in technologies such as VR and AR, the demand for technology equipment for traffic will increase wildly.

According to the statistics of the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology in 2015, the monthly traffic consumption of every netizen in China is close to 2G. Once the growth demand of technology equipment for traffic increases, the traffic expenditure is still a lot of money. Moreover, the current situation is that when mobile operators develop 4G and 5G, they have invested heavily in the early stage. Although they have been shouting to reduce traffic tariffs, the price of mobile traffic is still expensive for most users. In the scenarios of long-distance public travel and long-distance bus travel, free WiFi still has a certain appeal. But the premise is to ensure that bus wifi can provide a smooth experience that is no less than that of mobile cellular networks. This is also the direction that the free wifi operators who are currently staking the field are working hard to configure better technical equipment to ensure a smoother Internet experience for users. This is also the basis for the development of free wifi.

In addition, for bus wifi operators, only relying on traffic entry and providing advertising services cannot form a competitive business model. If there are no breakthroughs in function points and business models based on their own usage scenarios, there will be no essential difference between bus WiFi and future urban WiFi, and there will be no living space. The core competitiveness of these enterprises requires continuous breakthroughs and innovations based on operational and service capabilities to find new profit points and functional points that attract users. Making breakthroughs in usage scenarios is one of the most basic directions. In the personalized scene of public transportation, you can access the street view map according to different bus routes, and combine with store display and discount collection; if it is a tourist route, you can form a temporary chat entrance on the bus, and visitors who come to this city for tourism People can enter, look for travelers on the road, meet local people, and share local travel advice; if you meet a girl you like in the car, you may also send a greeting message through the bus wifi connection, etc.

Whether it is social demands or information demands, functions can be combined. Through the combination of different functions in personalized scenarios, the bus wifi platform can be transformed from an Internet portal into a comprehensive platform integrating information, interaction, entertainment and other functions. Based on the use of these functions, the accumulated user usage records and behavior analysis will also become a valuable asset for free wifi operators. Now that big data mining and development technologies are becoming more and more mature, it is possible to obtain complete user preferences and behavioral trajectories by collecting and analyzing user data. This information in turn can be the basis for planning you to change to a new innovative point of free wifi.

As Yu Lijuan, Secretary General of the Developer Core Value Group of the Internet Society of China said, if bus wifi only stays at the bottom entrance, it will become a pipe like 3G and 4G. If you only stay in providing traffic entrance and rely on advertising mode to support yourself, then the prospect of bus wifi will not improve. If you can combine bus wifi with more personalized scenarios, increase the attractiveness of use and make functional innovations, This market really has the imagination.