Case Study: King County Department of Transportation achieves reliable LTE connectivity and real-time AVL across its bus fleet with Cradlepoint NetCloud Service for Mobile

Seattle Transit Agency Welcomes Aboard Reliable LTE for In-Vehicle Systems

King County Department of Transportation (operating King County Metro), the largest public transit agency in Washington serving more than 2.25 million people and over 130 million rides annually, faced failing end-of-life in-vehicle wireless hardware that caused frequent dropped connections. These outages disrupted real-time GPS/AVL, fare payment systems, and traffic-signal priority, while a lean IT team lacked cloud-based tools for fleetwide installs, firmware updates, and troubleshooting. To address this, the agency selected Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Service for Mobile with rugged IBR1700 LTE routers (and IBR900 endpoints at select stops).

Cradlepoint deployed NetCloud Manager and LTE routers across more than 1,700 buses and 150 upgraded stops, delivering pervasive cellular connectivity and centralized cloud management. The rollout restored reliable AVL/GPS and fare processing, enabled remote fleetwide firmware pushes (e.g., scheduled 3 a.m. updates), sped troubleshooting via a cloud console, reduced in-person maintenance, and improved rider experience and operational efficiency—while providing a scalable platform for future growth.

King County Department of Transportation

Russ Mattichak

Network Engineer