Representative deployment (illustrative composite of typical heavy-civil / infrastructure results)
Situation
A heavy-civil joint venture began a 30-month highway interchange and bridge program spanning ~3 miles of rural right-of-way: a main compound (six trailers, batch plant), two remote laydown yards, 22 cameras across critical structures, concrete maturity sensors on every major pour, equipment telematics on 40+ machines, weekly drone photogrammetry (3–6 GB per flight), and a peak crew above 250. No carrier delivered more than 8 Mbps anywhere on the alignment. The nearest fiber was 4.5 miles away.
Old-way cost
- Rural fiber construction estimate: $96,000 with a 5–6 month lead — and it would only reach the main compound, not the remote yards.
- Status-quo fallback from the JV’s previous rural program: hotspots that barely worked, drone data driven to town on hard drives, camera coverage written off as “best effort.” Estimated productivity drag plus data-sneakernet labor: $3k–$5k/month, unquantified schedule risk on a program with $35k/day general conditions.
Solution
West Networks deployed a Mega-Site Kit:
- Backhaul: Peplink MAX HD4 bonding four SIMs across three carriers, with two Starlink terminals added into the SpeedFusion bond as additional WAN paths — satellite carrying the load where cellular was thinnest.
- Distribution: 16× AP One Enterprise — main compound and batch plant, plus point-to-point links extending coverage to both remote laydown yards; a MAX BR1 Pro 5G serving the far yard as a satellite-fed spur node.
- SIM Injector pooling all cellular plans; VLANs for office / crew / cameras+sensors / telematics; the whole fleet in InControl.
Results
- Deploy time: 3 days for the full 3-mile footprint — versus a 5–6 month fiber lead that would have covered one compound.
- Bandwidth: 165 Mbps aggregate where no single path exceeded 8 Mbps cellular / 90 Mbps satellite; WAN smoothing kept VoIP and camera streams stable through weather-driven Starlink dips and daily tower congestion.
- Cost: $27,800 hardware one-time + $1,150/month data (cellular pool + 2 Starlink plans) vs. $96,000 avoided fiber construction — and the remote yards got covered, which fiber never would have done.
- Drone workflow: 3–6 GB photogrammetry sets uploaded from the field in under 15 minutes; the hard-drive shuttle ended in week one.
- Uptime: 99.95% across 30 months, including two regional cellular outages fully absorbed by the satellite paths — zero connectivity-caused schedule slip against $35k/day general conditions.
- Sensors: 100% of concrete maturity data delivered live; two pours re-sequenced early on real-time strength data, each avoiding an estimated 1-day crew standby.
- Reuse: kit redeployed to the JV’s next program; the HD4 + Starlink architecture became the JV’s standard mobilization spec. Amortized across a decade of programs, connectivity capex rounds to noise.
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