(25 Sep 2018, 5:54 am)Dan wrote It relates to the hardware sitting behind the scenes rather than whether the screen is LED or a TFT monitor - although Jamie is right in suggesting that most of the buses with TFT monitors have the older system sitting behind the scenes.

The Quaylink vehicles (as well as the aforementioned 5389 and 8329 as two spares) were fitted with a new version of the system last year, bringing the hardware sitting behind the scenes up to the standard of a bus with an LED screen, so to speak. The Sunderland Connect and Hadrian's Wall AD122 Solos are the only other exceptions where buses with TFT monitors also have the newer system.

There are still 113 vehicles in the fleet with the older system, which is very outdated technology now (it's essentially a Windows XP computer). These cannot be updated wirelessly (using the on-bus Wi-Fi) and have a lower amount of storage space available. Because the hardware is so old, it is failing and not supported by Hanover anymore. Work is going on behind the scenes to have the hardware replaced but it's quite costly and not something that can be done overnight.

Any bus with the newer hardware is able to have audio announcements working for any route - regardless of whether it has a TFT monitor or an LED screen - and work is underway on programming the routes these buses are allocated to on evenings and Sundays (i.e. the X70/X71 at Stanley, 11 at Percy Main, and so on). The creation process for the older systems is much much longer, not forgetting the time it then takes to manually load each bus via USB (>10 minutes, which is subject to increase even further if the update process causes "damage" to the old unit). Although Go North East leads the way in the region with the on-board announcements, and has done since they invested in the technology back in 2010, this comes at the price of now having a lot of old kit which needs to be replaced.