Cameras on buses improve the safety of drivers and passengers, support investigations and, in many cities, feed into wider safe city programmes. The recordings sit on a video recorder inside each bus, alongside engine, fuel and driving data. None of it is useful until it reaches the central video and fleet management systems, and for most operators that happens at the depot.
How much video a bus produces
Four HD cameras produce around 32 GB of video in an eight-hour shift, and more than 48 GB in a twelve-hour shift. A 500-vehicle fleet can generate up to 16 TB every shift. The amount for any vehicle is cameras × bitrate in Mbps × hours × 3,600 ÷ 8,000, in gigabytes. Higher resolutions, more cameras and longer shifts all push it up.
Manual offload
Pulling footage by hand over USB 3.0 takes around nine minutes per vehicle, which adds up to 15 hours a day across a 100-vehicle fleet, before anyone has walked to the bus or found the right drive. Poorly designed systems can leave a driver or technician waiting on board for up to an hour while the data transfers. It is slow, it ties up staff, and it is easy to miss a vehicle or copy the wrong file.
Offload over 4G or 5G
Cellular offload removes the walk to the bus, but it charges for every gigabyte and depends on coverage inside the depot. Uplink is the weak side of public mobile networks: each device often gets about 2 to 10 Mbps. At 10 Mbps, a single 30 GB recording takes nearly seven hours to upload, and many buses returning at once share the same cell.
Depot Wi-Fi
Standard Wi-Fi access points can move data faster, but they slow down when many vehicles arrive together, because they all share the same few access points. Buses also move around the depot for cleaning, refuelling and parking, and conventional Wi-Fi can drop the connection each time a vehicle passes from one access point to the next.
What a wireless mesh does differently
With an Anywhere network, a compact node on each bus connects to fixed nodes around the depot within a fraction of a second of arrival, with no action from the driver. The connection holds while the bus is parked, cleaned, refuelled or moved.
- Many vehicles transfer at the same time, with traffic balanced across paths and drop-off points
- No per-gigabyte charges, because the operator owns the network
- Video protected with AES-128 on the wireless link and AES-256 end to end
- Vehicle nodes are PoE powered and IP67 rated
- Transfers and the network are monitored centrally through Anywhere Node Manager
Sizing a depot network
The figure that matters is how much video arrives in the busiest return window. As an example, 50 buses with 30 GB each returning within one hour need about 3.3 Gbps of combined capacity, which is why depot designs spread the load across several drop-off points rather than one access point. The time each vehicle spends in the depot sets the per-vehicle rate: moving 30 GB in ten minutes needs about 400 Mbps.
In practice
A Middle Eastern police force uses Anywhere nodes to offload video from more than 1,000 vehicles. Each produces around 27 GB per shift from five cameras, and offload completes in under 10 minutes per vehicle, in outdoor temperatures that can reach 65°C.
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