Remote monitoring network for a water utility
Sixty LTE gateways with Modbus polling, central monitoring and VPN. Zero field service callouts in a year.
The brief
Sixty pumping stations and reservoirs scattered across a region, each with a PLC nobody sees until something breaks. The goal: get PLC data into the control room and have real-time visibility.
The solution
We deployed a Teltonika TRB245 at each site — an LTE gateway with RS485 that:
- Reads registers from the PLC over Modbus RTU.
- Publishes them via MQTT to a central broker.
- Maintains a permanent WireGuard tunnel back to HQ for remote PLC access.
Centrally: Mosquitto → Telegraf → Prometheus → Grafana. Alerts reach dispatch via email and an SMS gateway.
Why Teltonika
We evaluated three alternatives. The decision came down to serial ports on the device itself (not via a USB adapter), a 7–30 V DC input range matching the existing cabinets, and RutOS with native Modbus → MQTT support, which meant we didn’t need an industrial PC at each site.
Result
One year in: zero field service callouts caused by the devices. Two carrier outages were absorbed by automatic failover to the second SIM.