The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Bus route numbers available on Reliance cellphones

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Sep 29, 2004

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Bus route numbers available on Reliance cellphones

By Our Special Correspondent

BANGALORE, SEPT. 28. If you are lost in an unfamiliar part of the city and wondering which bus to take to another destination and when the bus will arrive, you can click on your mobile phone and get all the information you need.

Of course, you have to be Reliance India Mobile user, and the facility comes through the R World facility which was launched on Tuesday. The bus-route application provides complete information to any bus passenger on city routes. After choosing the starting place and the destination on the menu on the mobile phone display, the user will be presented with different options of bus routes available along with the entire route map. After selecting the bus route number, the user will get information on the area from where the bus starts, frequency of the service, name of the bus stop from where to board the bus, name of the destination stop, start and end timings. There are three search options. Stop-to-stop search provides bus routes that go from the user's starting stop to the destination. Area-to-Area option provides all bus routes connecting the two areas and a list of stops in those areas. The indirect search provides bus routes with a changeover when there is no direct bus route available between the selected stops. The user also has the option to view `selected route' that displays the list of all bus stops between the two points chosen and the `full route' that lists all stops on the route.

Plans

"We have provided information on over 900 bus stops and route details for over 400 bus numbers and covered 9,000 route sectors. We will shortly be adding the suburban routes,'' Mahesh Prasad, President (Applications and Solutions), Reliance Infocomm, said. Railway ticket bookings and airline bookings online through mobile phones were planned, he added. Since the Java-based application had download speeds of up to 144 kbps, R World applications were quick to download.

The Managing Director of the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation, M.R. Sreenivasa Murthy, said a similar facility could be designed for the KSRTC which had gone online with bookings available through 120 counters in six cities in the State and with more being added. The Reliance mobile facility was a vast change from the days commuters had to consult a pocket guide issued for Rs. 2.

The Managing Director of the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), Upendra Tripathy, said the new facility would benefit a cross-section of three million commuters using city buses daily.

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