Electronics engineers take pride in putting Hong Kong at the cutting edge of innovation. A new challenge facing local engineers has been how to keep notebook users online while in a moving taxi.
'This is a world first for our city and a fair challenge for the electronics engineer,' said Alan Mok, SmarTone-Vodafone's special project general manager for engineering and operations.
Mr Mok and his team applied 3G mobile technology to 100 taxis so a notebook user could plug into a USM modem and use the SmarTone-Vodafone radio network to go online.
The engineers and marketers of the product had in mind taxi passengers who wanted to catch up with work while on relatively long taxi journeys; for example, to and from the airport.
'People may ask 'What for?' Well, time is money and this matches the personality of Hong Kong,' Mr Mok said. 'It also shows the dynamic things we can do here.'
The service was launched in March and the electronics engineers from SmarTone-Vodafone carried out tests around the clock to ensure signal quality anywhere from Hong Kong Island to Kowloon and beyond, was good.
