Icomera, a provider of cellular broadband gateways, has announced that Eavesway Travel has equipped luxury team coaches for football clubs including Manchester United and Wigan Athletic with Icomera's Moovbox M200 mobile gateway that provides in-vehicle Wi-Fi hotspot connectivity at broadband speeds.
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 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.
"Premiere League teams expect the very best facilities on their vehicles," said Dave Palmer, SVP of Worldwide Sales at Icomera. "The Moovbox M200 has helped Eavesway distinguish their fleet from the competition by offering the very latest in carrier-class on-board communications, which ultimately not only benefits the passengers but also day-to-day fleet operations."
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. Moovbox products also offer multi-port secure Ethernet for IP-CCTV, DVR and telematics equipment with remote in-bound access for device control, and supports plug-and-play upgradability to future technologies such as WiMAX and LTE. The multi-user MoovManage service provides real-time device tracking, schedule adherence monitoring, remote device configuration, and Wi-Fi portal and usage statistics.