Representative deployment (illustrative composite of typical mid-rise commercial results)
Situation
A regional general contractor mobilized on a 9-story, 24-month office-over-retail project on a previously undeveloped downtown-adjacent parcel. No fiber facilities within reach of the site. On day one the project needed: a four-trailer office complex running Procore and Autodesk Construction Cloud, VoIP for the PM team, 10 security cameras plus a time-lapse unit, badge access at two gates, and usable WiFi for a crew that would peak near 150.
Old-way cost
- Carrier fiber construction quote: $42,000, lead time quoted at 110 days (arriving after structural steel topping-out was scheduled).
- Interim plan on prior jobs: crew hotspots and per-camera SIMs — historically ~$1,600/month ($38k over a comparable job) with recurring “camera offline” truck rolls.
- Exposure: general conditions on this job ran ~$18k/day; any connectivity-driven slip in RFI/submittal flow was direct schedule risk.
Solution
West Networks shipped a pre-configured Site-Wide WiFi Kit:
- Backhaul: Peplink MAX HD2 bonding two 5G carriers simultaneously via SpeedFusion, mast-mounted on the lead trailer.
- Distribution: 8× AP One Enterprise — four across the trailer complex, two in IP-rated enclosures covering laydown yard and gates, two staged for the vertical “hoist run” as the structure rose (relocated upward every ~3 floors).
- SIM pooling: SIM Injector for remote plan swaps.
- Four VLANs (office / crew / cameras+IoT / guest); cameras and time-lapse moved off individual SIMs onto the camera VLAN.
- Fleet management via InControl, monitored by West Networks.
Results
- Deploy time: 1 day. Superintendent connected power; site fully online the afternoon the trailers were set — 109 days ahead of the fiber quote’s lead time.
- Bandwidth: 340 Mbps aggregate typical (dual-carrier bond, metro coverage); full BIM model pulls in under 10 minutes.
- Cost: $10,400 hardware one-time + $520/month pooled data vs. $42,000 abandoned fiber — $31,600 avoided upfront, plus ~$1,100/month saved vs. the hotspot/SIM sprawl baseline (~$26k over the job).
- Uptime: 99.98% measured over 24 months; two single-carrier outage events passed unnoticed thanks to hot-failover — zero dead trailer days on a job burning $18k/day in general conditions.
- Camera truck rolls: from ~2/month on prior jobs to zero connectivity-caused rolls.
- Reuse: at handover the kit was unbolted in one afternoon and mobilized to the GC’s next project, re-tagged in InControl the same week. Effective hardware cost across its first two jobs: $5,200 per site and falling.