Shopping mall uses city buses with Social WiFi for marketing

Background

Sitting on both sides of the Vistula river in Poland, Płock is one of the country’s largest cities and therefore a public transport network to reflect that. With 41 separate bus routes, the network covers 88 square kilometres, helping commuters and travellers navigate the city with ease.

Płock municipality invest greatly in their green energy initiatives and encouraging more people to use public transport is a big part of that.

The municipality of Płock partnered with Galeria Wisła Shopping Mall in order to provide commuters and travellers with access to free WiFi while travelling. As part of making bus travel a more attractive proposition, free and easy connectivity to the internet was seen as something that can support this, as well as make the journey more enjoyable.

The Challenge

Whenever you build a network on public transport, two main issues always come up. The equipment that you need and the cost of mobile data. In both cases, there is very little that a captive portal provider like Social WiFi can do in order to reduce these costs.

It is therefore important to demonstrate that a return on investment can be generated through other means. And unlike typical businesses that Social WiFi work with, benefits such as getting a higher position on review aggregators are not on top of the list of requirements for bus operators.

What was high on the list of requirements was reliability. Sending an engineer to troubleshoot hardware problems on a bus is not ideal, so a technical solution had to be implemented that would work remotely and not have problems with regular powering on and off.

The Solution

Considering the needs and challenges of the project, Social WiFi proposed a hardware solution on Teltonika hardware. When building networks on transportation networks, Teltonika is a premier vendor to work with and the extra cost that you pay for their hardware will certainly be saved in the long run due to its exceptional reliability.

Their hardware does not require manual intervention when the router switches off and on, which is regularly the case because the network would only work when the bus is powered on with a running engine.

In order to generate a financial return on the investment, Galeria Wisła invested part of their marketing budget to sponsor the WiFi network and sold advertising space to their tenants. The implemented solutions allow Galeria Wisła and its partners to communicate with passengers through an elaborate system of messages and displaying banner advertising with redirection.

Budget was put into the promotion of the available network on the buses – an important part of making people aware of the availability. Not everybody expects to receive Free WiFi access on a bus, so awareness is important. Large promotion was wrapped on the out of every bus with the available service and also further promotion within.

The Result

The network has proven popular among the passengers, reaching an average of over 5,000 connections per month. This resulted in over 100,000 remarketing codes being triggered for the devices, so that marketing content can be targeted more efficiently.

Even though gathering reviews was not a priority, the city has collected some valuable feedback by asking passengers for ideas on what to improve.