Case Study

Field Services Company

Application: Monitoring and managing chemical fluid systems used in well head stimulation
Industry: Oil and Gas

 

Introduction

The customer has trailers and equipment throughout the United States, with the majority located in remote oil fields.

The customer needs reliable communication and had previously contracted with both Tier-1 Carrier A and Tier-1 Carrier B directly for cellular connectivity. Because of coverage gaps and signal strength variations, this dual-carrier engagement was a necessity. With the mobile and remote nature of the application, cellular technology for internet access was paramount.

System Requirements

Most applications were “pushed based” meaning the edge equipment itself would push information out to the internet. There was an occasional need to be able to remote back into the devices from a centralized location to update firmware, make configuration changes, etc. For Carrier A, they had public static IPs that could accomplish this but for Carrier B the cost and setup were too large and they did not have static IPs available.

Public static IP’s introduced a security risk that they wanted to mitigate but IT resources were limited to building a full end to end private network

Usage from month to month could vary greatly by location depending on personnel that could be on-site and leveraging the cellular internet connection more frequently than when not on-site.

Solve Networks Solution

Solve Networks was able to provide a turnkey “hosted” VPN service for the customer to utilize private static IPs. This allowed the customer to invest zero IT resources into the project but still get VPN access to Solve Networks to access each SIM at a private static IP address. Working with Solve Networks they can do this for every SIM card, on both AT&T and Verizon getting full remote access with a secured / private architecture.

Solve Networks was able to provide Small, Medium, and Large plans for the customer to utilize.  The customer can dynamically shift between these plans at any time to ensure they are utilizing the largest amount of their purchased data every month. This has equated to large cost savings from the previous set up having to work with both carriers independently.

Solve Networks was able to provide multiple Tier 1 providers service pooled together.  This means the customer can leverage both major carriers and doesn’t have to worry about which one is being used and counting data across the two. They pick the strongest signal and don’t have to worry about which network is being utilized.

Example IoT Solution Diagram