For an added layer of resiliency and more bandwidth in fleets, use cellular-optimized SD-WAN through dual-modem routers
Imagine you’re a first responder racing to the scene of an emergency: every second counts and reliable communication is critical. But suddenly, your in-vehicle network connection drops. No access to real-time dispatch updates, no critical data transfers, and potentially hampered communication with fellow responders. This scenario underscores the vital role of dependable connectivity in vehicles, especially when public safety is at stake.
By establishing network redundancy using a dual-modem router in vehicles, situations like this can be easily prevented. These routers provide automatic failover between two carriers, ensuring a seamless connection on the go. Think of it like a busy highway with two lanes — if one gets blocked, you can easily switch to the other. It’s an excellent option for staying connected even in spotty coverage areas, but what if there was a way to improve network resiliency even further?
Mobile SD-WAN is critical to making that happen, acting like a smart traffic director to increase reliability and optimize your network by utilizing multiple connections simultaneously. This translates to more than just a backup — it means smoother operations and a truly resilient connection for your fleet.
How mobile SD-WAN and dual modems work together
Keeping your fleet connected anywhere on the road is crucial for enabling in-vehicle applications and real-time communication in virtually any industry. With more sophisticated vehicle technology and an increased need for real-time video streaming, creating a resilient network is fundamental.
How do dual-modem routers work?
A dual-modem router has two active radio connections, allowing SIM cards from different carriers to be active simultaneously. If one signal is degraded, the dual-modem router automatically switches from one carrier to another without downtime.
Dual-modem routers can accommodate multiple connectivity options, including cellular and satellite, making them particularly useful for those driving connected vehicles traveling in and out of coverage areas.
How does SD-WAN work?
Imagine SD-WAN as a smart navigation system for your vehicles. It manages and directs traffic across a wide area network (WAN) using features such as intelligent traffic handling and link bonding. SD-WAN improves network performance and reliability by automatically selecting the best path for data and making it easier to manage and optimize your network.
Using SD-WAN on top of a dual-modem router guarantees the most reliable connection needed for mission-critical applications in vehicles, including ones that allow police officers to look up CJIS information or license plates, for example. Let’s explore how this works.
In what situations do you need mobile SD-WAN?
Mobile SD-WAN is useful in practically any vehicle situation to help optimize connectivity and network performance.
Mission-critical communications
For different forms of mission-critical communication, SD-WAN enables features such as flow duplication for better reliability. Flow duplication effectively bonds two WAN connections to create an unbreakable WAN connection by duplicating and sending application data across both links.
Primarily used in vehicles roaming between different cellular providers or between cellular and satellite networks, it automatically selects the two strongest links if more than two are available through a dual WAN router. This way, if one network is disrupted, there is congestion, or even a failure, applications will continue to function, providing a much higher level of resiliency to keep police tech and other in-vehicle applications up and running. However, this method uses double the data, so it should be reserved for your most essential traffic to save costs.
High-bandwidth applications
Often, a single connection isn’t sufficient for high-bandwidth applications like high-quality video streaming. SD-WAN can address this by aggregating bandwidth from both modem connections to create a fatter pipe, also known as link aggregation or link bonding. This technology merges multiple LAN or WAN interfaces into a single virtual connection, enhancing bandwidth, efficiency, and application resilience.
The benefits of using mobile SD-WAN in vehicles
While dual modems alone provide reliable cellular failover capabilities, mobile SD-WAN takes it a step further, giving enterprises much more granularity, flexibility, and control over network traffic.
With SD-WAN, businesses can monitor all applications on their network and establish policies for prioritizing them. It also allows enterprises to implement more features, such as forward error correction (FEC), to improve resiliency, performance, and application quality of experience (QoE) across the WAN.
Forward error correction
When an application encounters weak signal quality, it tends to resend requests multiple times to maintain connectivity, consuming significant bandwidth. Using FEC can enhance application performance by reducing these repetitive retries, leading to a better QoE over unreliable connections and optimizing bandwidth usage.