In recent years, there has been an increasing spread of sophisticated systems in public transport of bus companies. The range of onboard systems now includes:

• automatic vehicle localization systems for timetable management and bus arrival prediction for waiting passengers,
• bus camera systems for storing and/or streaming video recordings,
• charge collection systems with open payment processing and real-time credit check,
• automatic vehicle monitoring systems that report the status of mechanical and electronic bus components and passenger counting systems.

Such systems are now commonly connected to garage-area networks and are increasingly being wirelessly networked in real-time throughout the transit service area using commercial cellular services.