LandCruisers, with some special tech, can be the mobile cell towers and a lifeline to remote Australian towns.
It’s staggering to think that over 65 percent (or around 5 million square kilometres) of Australia has no cell signal whatsoever. Most of us city dwellers kick up a fuss when signal strength takes a dip or when we’re downgraded to a lower speed tier.
To remedy this, at least in part, a clever vehicle-based solution has been devised that operates on certain Toyota LandCruisers that roam the Outback. Toyota says that in certain populated areas of Australia’s great central expanse (such as those where they are testing), nearly 90 percent of all off-roaders are LandCruisers.
The Toyota LandCruiser Emergency Network began in 2015, and runs in partnership with Flinders University in Adelaide as well as Saatchi and Saatchi Australia. Although it does bring some much needed communication to the landscape, the area covered is a mere one percent of the total amount of land cut off from cellular signals.
The LandCruisers are fitted with a small device, enabling them to create a pop-up emergency network to allow digital communication to even the most remote and dangerous parts of the Australian outback.
It’s a ‘store-and-forward’ comm method. Using a mix of Wi-Fi, UHF (ultra-high frequency) radio waves and Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN), each Land Cruiser can effectively be used as a hotspot to relay information within a 25 kilometre radius, passing information to and from each Land Cruiser until one or more of them come within a cellular tower and passes the information to the network at large.
Brad Cramb, Divisional Manager of Marketing at Toyota Australia, said: "The marrying of communications technology and the LandCruiser a vehicle that has a long history in the outback presents a huge opportunity for us to provide much-needed infrastructure to remote communities around Australia.”
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