Securing Thousands of Smart Safes Across the Country — No Truck Roll Required
Michael Crayton, National Sales Account Manager
Picture thousands of smart safes and cash recyclers, scattered across the back rooms of retailers and restaurants nationwide, counting cash so nobody has to run to the bank every day. Now picture every single one of them able to check in only if a single carrier’s signal happens to reach that spot.
Betting the Safe on One Signal
That’s the bet this customer was making. A safe in one part of town might get a strong signal on one network; a location a few miles away might get almost no connection on that same carrier. There’s no way to know which one wins until you’re already locked in — and by then, you’ve built a fleet of thousands of devices around a single point of failure. Multiply that across every site in the country, and there’s no spreadsheet, no field tech, no single person who can track which carrier is failing where.
Plus, there was a second problem hiding in plain sight: every one of these devices sat on a public static IP address, visible on the open internet. A safe reachable on a public IP can be found, fingerprinted, and potentially probed remotely — turning a connectivity problem into a physical security one. Additionally, while the connection may be secured from unwanted access, it can still incur data costs from unwanted traffic that can result in large overage bills on data the customer wasn’t even generating.
Solved from a Thousand Miles Away
Solve didn’t send a technician to swap SIM cards across thousands of already-deployed sites. With a fleet this size, that would have meant months of truck rolls and site visits just to get back to where the customer started. Instead, we pushed new eSIM profiles out over the air, straight to hardware that was already running.
Every device came out the other side connected to all three major U.S. carriers instead of locked to one, automatically running on whichever network actually performed best at that specific address. Nobody had to figure that out site by site, and nobody had to leave the office to make it happen.
While we were there, we handled the second issue as well — moving every device off a public IP and onto one that’s privately assigned. The safes (and the cash inside them) stopped being visible to anyone on the open internet.
One Bill, No Blind Spots
Managing carrier relationships across thousands of locations wasn’t sustainable. Now, every device finds its own best connection, updates happen without anyone leaving the office, and the door that was left open to the internet is shut.
That’s the thing about connectivity at scale: it’s never really about the SIM card. It’s about knowing which network wins where, and being able to fix it everywhere at once instead of one at a time.
Managing connectivity across a fleet of distributed devices? Let’s talk about what that could look like for you.
About the Author
Michael Crayton leads enterprise sales at Solve Networks, working across oil & gas, energy, industrial automation, and digital signage — bringing on new accounts and working directly with router OEMs, system integrators, and other service providers to translate complex network requirements into carrier-agnostic solutions built on Solve’s Clarity™ platform. Before joining Solve in 2025, Michael spent over a decade at Industrial Networking Solutions, where he worked across OT/IT networking for mission-critical industrial applications — representing brands like Cisco, Sierra Wireless, Moxa, and Ericsson/Cradlepoint, and delivering network design, security consultation, and audit services for some of the most demanding environments in the industrial space.
