Water Utility Vehicles Supported by Cradlepoint Mobile Solutions

Utility Field Crews Supported by Cradlepoint Vehicle Routers

Regardless of the type of utility — or whether it’s publicly or privately operated — ensuring that systems are up and running every hour of every day is absolutely essential to business. Utilities are tasked with the mission-critical task of ensuring residents within their municipalities have access to some of the most basic, but vital, necessities — water, oil, gas, and electricity.

When there are outages or issues within a community, or if a utility has internal issues that are impacting its ability to deliver resources, peoples lives can be severely impacted. For utilities that deliver water services, an inability to access fresh, drinkable water can quickly become a life or death matter, especially for residents unable to procure water from other means.

In order to keep water utilities up and running, crews are often dispatched at all hours of the day and night, in all weather conditions, to remediate issues. The crews need to be able to reliably communicate with their headquarters, dispatchers, and each other while also having access to existing and incoming information (such as weather and materials updates) that could impact how they handle a situation.

The Challenge

Aging Water Utility Fleets and Overloaded Systems Diminish Connectivity

Once dispatched, water utility field crews need round-the-clock constant and reliable access to the cloud applications and smart devices they use to perform on-site service visits and repairs.

One American water and wastewater utility realized that as technology advances, their reliance on such applications and devices continued to increase. Unfortunately, their aging field service vehicle fleet was experiencing incidents related to network congestion and limited bandwidth resulting in partial and complete failures to connect that required in-person remediation.

This particular utility happened to be located in a temperate region that experiences incredibly warm summers and below-freezing winters. They realized that Mother Nature was negatively impacting the performance of fleet hardware that wasn’t built to withstand the elements.

These instances of poor connectivity were deemed unacceptable. They stalled maintenance and repair schedules, while also requiring they re-task internal resources, often delaying the completion of other vital projects while they worked to restore fleet connectivity.

The Solution

Utility Vehicle Security, Reliability, and Longevity with NetCloud

The situation had gotten so dire that some employees had lost complete confidence in the installed systems within the fleet and were using their personal cellular devices as hot-spots in order to get the job done. While this was not ideal by any means — least of all because it meant employees were using their personal resources to complete their jobs — it also opened the entire operation up to security risks.

Searching for a solution that would deliver security, reliability, and longevity, the utility landed on USAT and Cradlepoint. Their key considerations were to replace their aging equipment with a ruggedized solution that could withstand the elements, provide a very good signal, and could be remotely managed and maintained to eliminate the need to take service vehicles off the road when troubleshooting.

Cradlepoint R1900 for Water Utility Field Service Vehicles

This water utility reached out to USAT to help them provision and deploy Cradlepoint’s wireless 5G edge routers (specifically the R1900 and MC400-5G equipped IBR1700) with multi-year NetCloud Service for Mobile plans, and external antennas (like the Mobile Mark LTMWG943) purpose-built for vehicles, to address the connectivity issues throughout their fleet.

Mobile Mark Antennas for Water Utility Field Service Vehicles

NetCloud Manager allows them to immediately identify the source of the connectivity issue — whether it’s the laptop, carrier, power supply, Wi-Fi, or router itself — and troubleshoot the issue immediately. The wireless edge solution and external antennas mean that they can expect — and rely on — constant cellular connectivity inside and outside of the vehicle.

The Results

“The Cadillac of Wireless Network Solutions” for Water Utilities

The field team can now use their vehicle connection and devices with as much reliability as if they were sitting in an office. They can also depend on the devices needed to do the job while outside of the vehicle.

Further, the IT team can monitor connections and provide troubleshooting remotely, without having to take the vehicle off its route and back to headquarters. Their Data Center and Client Services Supervisor referred to it as “the Cadillac of wireless network solutions,” emphasizing that the real-time visibility is incredibly useful.

Cradlepoint Mobile Connectivity for Water Utility Field Service Vehicles

Our Team

Device Provisioning, Activation and Installation Services for Water Utility Vehicles

USAT serves the nation’s critical infrastructure by creating secure communication networks that pass data wirelessly between key systems - linking remote personnel, locations, and machine assets. We work with public and private utilities across the entire USA — equipping them with the cellular connectivity solutions they need for their various fixed and mobile applications.

Having received the 5G for Enterprise Branch Specialization from our partners at Cradlepoint, we are expertly equipped to provide targeted 5G IoT connectivity solutions that fit our clients' exacting needs. Our team sells, designs, configures, and installs the wireless edge devices and management platforms utilities need to succeed in our technology driven world.

The Download

Save Solution for Later or Share It With Colleagues

If you'd like to reflect back on this 5G networking solution or share it with colleagues, we've included a simple download of this article in a PDF format. Just click below to view it as a PDF and then click save.

Download as PDF >>