Utility crews can’t afford poor connectivity when responding to safety critical incidents, so when Hydro Ottawa’s in-vehicle connectivity solution became increasingly unreliable, the utility sought a new hardware that could survive the harsh environment.
Utilities operate where the weather, geography and urgency of the work leave no room for unreliable communications. Field crews depend on reliable connectivity to receive dispatches, access schematics and outage histories, record work and coordinate with control centres – often while working in cold winters, blistering summers, or on rough roads.
For utilities, the network hardware that lives in service trucks and vans must be purpose-built for that reality: ruggedised, temperature-tolerant, and able to withstand vibration, shock, dust and moisture while also being manageable remotely.
Hydro Ottawa Limited distributes electricity to more than 350,000 residential and commercial customers in Canada. The core businesses of the corporation are electricity distribution, renewable energy generation, and energy and utility services.
The utility’s initial consumer-grade in-vehicle connectivity solution became increasingly unreliable as the fleet used it over several seasons. Hardware failures and network downtime rose at a time when crews were relying on more devices and applications in the field.
In a recent interview conducted by Ericsson for its customer case study, Hydro Ottawa said that it’s vital for their vehicles to have internet connectivity when sending employees to respond to outages and other problems during emergencies.
With seasonal extremes in Ottawa – big swings between summer heat and winter cold –were wreaking havoc on equipment not designed for those conditions, with Hydro Ottawa noting that 90 per cent of its network failure problems stemmed from the environment. The operational impact was compounded by the way issues were diagnosed and fixed. With the previous solution, software updates and troubleshooting had to be performed manually, one vehicle at a time – an approach that is time‑consuming and impractical as fleets scale into the hundreds. Hydro Ottawa needed hardware that would survive harsh environments and a management model that allowed its lean IT team to monitor and remediate issues remotely.
Ericsson’s Cradlepoint line of ruggedised cellular routers provided the solution Hydro Ottawa required. Built specifically for in‑vehicle and field deployments, the routers are engineered to operate across wide temperature ranges and to resist environmental stresses such as high humidity, dust ingress, and water splash. The designs also account for continual movement and physical shock, attributes that directly address the vibration and jostling encountered on utility service routes.
Beyond physical robustness, remote manageability is essential for utilities. Hydro Ottawa deployed Ericsson Cradlepoint routers together with high‑performance external antennas across its fleet of vans and trucks and adopted Ericsson’s cloud-based NetCloud Manager for centralised control. The cloud platform enabled the IT team to push firmware updates, monitor dashboards and generate reports remotely, and accelerate diagnosis and resolution of issues from anywhere with ease.
They were able to determine whether an incident originated with Wi‑Fi, a laptop, the carrier, the power supply or the router itself without sending a technician to every vehicle.
The results are instructive for other utilities. First, selecting industrial-grade, ruggedised routers reduces the frequency of hardware failures caused by climate and motion — the most common failure modes Hydro Ottawa experienced. Second, combining resilient hardware with cloud-based management reduces downtime and the operational burden on IT teams, allowing them to scale fleet connectivity without linear growth in support costs. For utilities planning or refreshing mobile connectivity, several practical takeaways emerge from Hydro Ottawa’s experience:
Specify ruggedisation and environmental ratings. Look for routers rated for wide operating temperatures, ingress protection against dust and water splash, and mechanical tolerance for vibration and shock.
Use high-performance external antennas to maximise cellular signal quality in vehicles, where metal bodies and routing interference can otherwise degrade connectivity.
Adopt centralised, cloud-based network management to push updates, view health dashboards, and troubleshoot remotely – turning what used to be a field call-out into a few clicks from the operations centre.
Consider lifecycle and total cost of ownership. Spending more on durable devices and remote management typically reduces truck rolls, emergency replacements, and downtime during extreme weather events.
Utilities cannot afford intermittent connectivity when crews are restoring service or responding to safety‑critical incidents. The Hydro Ottawa case shows that combining ruggedised solutions like Ericsson Cradlepoint routers with remote cloud management delivers the reliability and operational efficiencies utilities need to keep crews connected, systems visible, and lights on – even in the harshest conditions.
