From the bustling nightlife of Las Vegas to the most isolated corners of the state, every state trooper in Nevada needs the right tools to help them do their jobs safely and effectively. For the Nevada Highway Patrol (NHP), covering 110,000 square miles, Cradlepoint’s in-vehicle networking solutions help officers “man” areas where cell service can be spotty or nonexistent, reported PoliceOne.
“A lot of our issues relate to connectivity.
There are desolate parts of the state that you don’t get cell or internet service,” said Lt. Chris LaPrairie, commander of NHP’s research and planning section. “We don’t even have radio service in some areas.”
On stretches of U.S. Route 50, known as “The Loneliest Road in America,” officers can encounter dead zones where the closest tower is a few dozen miles away. In order to stay “online,” vehicles require seamless connectivity while traveling between service areas covered by different carriers, physical access to vehicle modems, and the ability to upload video anytime, anywhere.
Thanks to Cradlepoint’s LTE solutions, including Cradlepoint COR Series mobile routers and its cloud-based network management service, LaPrairie’s team has carrier flexibility, remote management and other features that help keep troopers safe on remote highways, reported PoliceOne.
Each Cradlepoint router uses an embedded LTE modem with two SIM slots, providing the flexibility for the department’s IT team to remotely set the SIM card to the appropriate coverage area based on the trooper’s beat. The router can be programmed to automatically switch from one active SIM to the other, in response to fluctuations in signal strength and latency. With the “zero-touch deployment” capabilities in Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Manager platform, remote NHP programmers can deploy and manage updates without user intervention.
“We literally get in, make the changes, hit ‘send’ and the moment that that device powers up it automatically takes those changes,” said LaPrairie.
When the vehicle powers up, so does the modem, giving troopers immediate access to the information they need to start their shifts, reported PoliceOne. Additionally, the Cradlepoint solution offers processing speeds of up to 5 GHz. “We can upload video to the cloud for instantaneous access by our command staff from anywhere,” said LaPrairie.
The solution even comes in handy if radios fail. “If a trooper makes a traffic stop out in the middle of nowhere and they have no radio service, they can instant message dispatch to provide their location, nature of the call and any other pertinent details,” said LaPrairie. “It’s nice having that feature so they can maintain their own call and not worry that they’re going to be out in the middle of nowhere and no one’s going to know it.”
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March 6, 2019
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