Reliable Mobile Connectivity Is Essential For Public Safety
Picture yourself as a first responder rushing to an emergency scene: every moment is crucial, and reliable communication is paramount. Yet, if your in-vehicle network connection fails, you lose access to real-time dispatch updates, critical data transfers, and effective communication with fellow responders. This situation highlights the essential need for reliable vehicle connectivity, particularly in ensuring public safety.
Using a dual-modem router in vehicles establishes network redundancy, effectively preventing situations like connection failures. These routers automatically switch between two carriers, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity on the move. It's akin to a busy highway with dual lanes — if one lane encounters a blockage, you seamlessly transition to the other. This setup is ideal for maintaining connectivity in areas with inconsistent coverage.
However, Mobile SD-WAN plays a crucial role in further enhancing network resiliency. As a sophisticated traffic controller, Mobile SD-WAN optimizes network usage by harnessing multiple connections simultaneously. This isn't just about backup; it enhances overall operational efficiency and ensures a robust, reliable connection for your fleet.
How Mobile SD-WAN And Dual Modems Work Together
Maintaining continuous connectivity for your fleet on the road is essential to support in-vehicle applications and real-time communication across diverse industries. As vehicle technology advances and the demand for real-time video streaming grows, establishing a robust network infrastructure becomes increasingly vital.
How Do Dual Modem Routers Work?
A dual-modem router operates with two active radio connections, enabling simultaneous use of SIM cards from different carriers. If one carrier's signal weakens, the router seamlessly switches to another without interruption.
These routers support various connectivity options, including cellular and satellite, which benefits drivers of connected vehicles navigating through areas with fluctuating coverage. This versatility ensures reliable connectivity wherever the vehicle travels.
How Does SD-WAN Work?
Consider SD-WAN a sophisticated navigation system for your vehicles' network infrastructure. It efficiently directs and manages traffic across a wide area network (WAN) using advanced features like intelligent traffic handling and link bonding. By automatically choosing the optimal data path, SD-WAN significantly enhances network performance, reliability, and efficiency.
Integrating SD-WAN with a dual-modem router ensures the utmost reliability for mission-critical vehicle applications. For instance, police officers can seamlessly access vital databases like CJIS (Criminal Justice Information Services) or perform license plate lookups in real-time, regardless of the vehicle's location or network conditions.
This integration works by leveraging the dual-modem router's ability to maintain dual active connections with different carriers. If one carrier experiences congestion or signal degradation, SD-WAN intelligently reroutes traffic through the alternate carrier, ensuring uninterrupted connectivity and optimal data transmission speed. This approach enhances operational effectiveness and supports seamless communication and data access, essential for public safety and efficient fleet management.
When Do You Need SD-WAN?
Mobile SD-WAN proves invaluable across various scenarios by optimizing connectivity and network performance.
Mission-Critical Communications
SD-WAN offers features like flow duplication in mission-critical communication scenarios to enhance reliability. Flow duplication combines two WAN connections to create a robust, uninterrupted connection by duplicating and transmitting application data across both links.
This technology is particularly beneficial for vehicles switching between cellular providers or moving between cellular and satellite networks. It automatically selects the two strongest links from available options via a dual WAN router. If one network experiences disruption, congestion, or failure, applications can seamlessly continue operating, ensuring high resilience for essential in-vehicle technologies such as police tech.
However, it's important to note that flow duplication consumes double the data, which can impact costs. Therefore, reserving this method for critical traffic is advisable to optimize resource usage and manage expenses effectively.
High-Bandwidth Applications
In scenarios where a single connection may not suffice for high-bandwidth applications such as high-quality video streaming, SD-WAN provides a solution through bandwidth aggregation. This process, also known as link aggregation or link bonding, combines bandwidth from both modem connections to form a larger, more robust pipeline.
By merging multiple LAN or WAN interfaces into a unified virtual connection, SD-WAN significantly boosts bandwidth capacity, enhances operational efficiency, and fortifies application resilience. This approach ensures smoother data transmission and supports uninterrupted performance for demanding applications, making it ideal for diverse vehicle-based operations requiring reliable and efficient connectivity.
The Benefits of SD-WAN In Vehicles
While dual modems offer reliable cellular failover capabilities, mobile SD-WAN enhances this by providing enterprises with greater granularity, flexibility, and control over network traffic.
SD-WAN enables businesses to monitor all applications running on their network and establish specific policies for prioritizing them. This capability empowers enterprises to optimize network resources based on application needs, ensuring critical applications receive priority during network congestion or failures.
Additionally, SD-WAN supports advanced features like forward error correction (FEC). FEC improves resiliency by detecting and correcting errors in data transmission, thereby enhancing overall network performance and ensuring a better quality of experience (QoE) for applications across the WAN.
By integrating mobile SD-WAN with dual modems, enterprises can achieve a robust, resilient network infrastructure that supports diverse operational needs with enhanced reliability, performance, and application responsiveness.
Forward Error Correction
When applications face poor signal quality, they often resend requests multiple times to maintain connectivity, which can consume considerable bandwidth. Implementing forward error correction (FEC) can significantly enhance application performance in such scenarios.
FEC works by detecting and correcting errors in data transmission without the need for retransmission requests. This capability reduces the frequency of repetitive retries caused by weak signals, thereby improving the quality of experience (QoE) over unreliable connections. FEC optimizes bandwidth usage by minimizing data retransmission, ensuring more efficient and reliable application performance in challenging network conditions.
About MCA and Our CNS Team
MCA is one of the largest and most trusted integrators in the United States, offering world-class voice, data, and security solutions that enhance the quality, safety, and productivity of customers, operations, and lives. More than 65,000 customers trust MCA to provide carefully researched solutions for a safe, secure, and more efficient workplace.
Our Cellular Networking Solutions (CNS) team (formerly known as USAT) is made up of certified experts in designing and deploying fixed and mobile wireless data connectivity solutions for public and private enterprises nationwide - complete with implementation, training, proof of concept (POC), system auditing, and on-site RF surveying services with optional engineering maintenance contracts.
Our extensive Cradlepoint catalog of world-class routers, gateways, and software designed for remote monitoring and management in even the harshest environments allows us to deliver a full suite of reliable technologies capped with a service-first approach.
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