-
“Our LTE edge solutions enabled our vote centers to function properly and securely. The requirements of connection redundancy and enterprise-grade information security were clear; Cradlepoint and Verizon were able to help us get there.”
— Lester Lewis, Server and Network Manager, Dallas County Office of IT
Challenge
With the 2020 primaries approaching, the general election soon to follow and a transition to a vote center model underway, Dallas County’s Office of Information Technology sought a time-efficient solution to a deeply important challenge. Some of the complexity included:
- The requirements for every voter to have network connection redundancy so workers have constant access to information from electronic poll books and other devices
- Polling places are hosted in a wide range of buildings, requiring the county to bring its own network
- Existing consumer-grade Mi-Fis in place had limited capabilities
- Addressing the threat of security attacks and having the ability to scale and manage deployments across multiple locations was important
Solution
Election night workers needed to be able to rely on real-time information about who had and had not yet voted. Network downtime can greatly harm the integrity of the process. To solve that, at nearly 500 vote centers, Dallas County deployed :
- Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Service
- Enterprise-class wireless edge routers
- Multiple modems in each router enable redundant Wireless WAN connectivity, including highly available Verizon Wireless coverage.
Outcome
Dallas County’s office of IT used Cradlepoint’s cloud-based platform to:
- Drastically simplify preparation, deployment and management of edge security, connectivity and routing at hundreds of sites across a huge geographical area
- Help satisfy the stringent requirements for redundancy in vote centers
How We Built This Solution
500
Polling places covered by enterprise-class wireless edge routers
2
Modems per router for automatic failover
1
Verizon primary connection and carrier of choice