Technology has changed nearly every aspect of the portable sanitation business, but perhaps none so quickly and completely as mobile communications. Over the past five years, rapid miniaturization of printed microchips has enabled mobile telephones to become smaller and more powerful, while the proliferation of repeater towers has provided more contiguous signal service areas.
Combine these advancements with aggressive pricing competition between major providers and the addition of more than one push-to-talk network, and it’s no wonder the old standbys — dedicated two-way radios and CB setups — are going by the wayside.
Not surprisingly, all the PROs interviewed for this article have moved at least part of their dispatching and vehicle-to-vehicle communications to some kind of mobile phone device. With the addition of PDA-type add-ons such as barcode scanners and GPS capabilities, we expect this trend to continue. Here’s where it stands right now:
This third-generation family business runs eight trucks to place and service an inventory of about 1,500 units, of which an average of 800-900 are in the field at any given time. According to owner Mat Schenk, the company uses cell phones to communicate between trucks and also to dispatch drivers to new calls.
For T.S.F., mobile phones were an economic choice. “On our plan, after you get so many minutes, there’s no charge for cell-to-cell calls,” Schenk explains. He says that drivers do run into areas without reception in their territory, which spans metro Evansville in extreme southern Indiana. But he says those spots are few and far between, and drivers adjust by learning where they are and avoid making calls from those areas.
Sometimes things just happen with communications and dispatching, and that’s much the way it is with Lang’s On-Site Services. “When it comes to portable restrooms, we use cell phones. For our septic pumping business, we have our own two-way radio station,” says Rick Stowe, who manages operations in this northern Detroit suburb.
This multiple-technology system evolved organically, he explains. “We had the septic business originally and just added portables about four years ago. We only run our portables business one or two days a week, mostly for construction with a few special events. So we’ve never made that capital investment in the portables trucks to get another two-way system.”
Stowe doesn’t have any complaints about this split system of mobile communication. He says given an unlimited budget, he’d still leave it the way it is. “It’s what we have, and it works,” he says.
Dispatchers for Daugherty’s Services Inc. communicate with drivers using cell phones, according to driver Mike Reynolds. “We had two-way radios, but they kept breaking down,” he recalls. “The phones are just easier to get a hold of, and to use.”
Daugherty’s service territory is located in the public region between the northern and southern units of the Hoosier National Forest, just about 50 miles over the state line northwest of Louisville, Ky.
That means an abundance of areas where cell signals drop for lack of tower coverage, and that’s one drawback Reynolds finds with mobile phones. Reynolds says it’s not a big problem, and the company has never encountered any emergencies where it became an issue.
Generally, drivers needing to call in will just wait until they’re back in a service area. Reynolds doesn’t anticipate that the company will need to make any changes in driver communications in the foreseeable future.
