Network migration positions security leader for future innovations with 5G.

SONITROL, a verified electronic security company, faced a challenge many enterprises encountered when the major wireless carriers announced they were sunsetting their 3G network technology to make way for more advanced technologies like 4G (LTE) and 5G networks. In SONITROL’s case, the network shutdowns impacted their national franchise network, corporate-owned branches, and thousands of customers. 

For over 55 years, SONITROL has been a leader in the commercial security industry, providing cutting-edge security solutions to businesses of all sizes through a network of franchises and corporate-owned branches. SONITROL is known to provide some of the fastest police response times, lowest false alarm rates, and the best criminal apprehension record in the security industry. 

SONITROL’s customers relied on a mix of networking configurations to connect their security systems to their franchises’ central monitoring stations. This included a combination of both fixed wireline (traditional POTS lines) and wireless connections. While this setup worked well, it did not provide SONITROL the ability to support the variety of new data-intensive security devices.

SONITROL had been a Sprint Business customer for the past 10 years and was happy with the services Sprint provided. When Sprint merged with T-Mobile in 2020, that relationship moved to T-Mobile for Business, along with the announcement that T-Mobile was shutting down Sprint’s legacy 3G network.

Upon learning T-Mobile was going to sunset Sprint’s legacy 3G network to free up spectrum to better accommodate new technologies and services supported by 5G, SONITROL worked closely with the T-Mobile for Business conversion team to create a transparent migration plan. The team involved not only experts from T-Mobile for Business, but also key individuals from SONITROL, T-Mobile’s third-party technology partner Wireless Innovations, and all U.S. based franchises.

The plan called for working with each of SONITROL’s thousands of customers to identify the networking equipment affected by the network shut down and establish a process for migrating the old equipment to new Cradlepoint routers. 

As part of the plan, the migration team identified over 6,700 pieces of equipment that were impacted and created a process that allowed franchises to log into the SONITROL online store, where they could order the best router configuration and choose from four different rate plans based on their customer’s use case.

After the order was placed, Wireless Innovations configured the device, installed the correct SIM, and shipped the already activated router to the franchise for customer installation. This helped absorbed the complexity for the franchise’s field personnel.

Additionally, the solution makes use of Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Manager, which provides the franchises with analytics and insights into customer network traffic and data usage that were not previously available.

T-Mobile for Business was able to quickly provide SONITROL with a common, scalable wireless platform that could be monitored, quickly assessed, and serviced to minimize any customer security panel outage. And where wireless connectivity was once used as a backup, it now serves as the primary network connection.

The new T-Mobile network will allow SONITROL to introduce advanced security solutions that take advantage of T-Mobile’s 5G leadership brining more efficiency and control to the monitoring process while also reducing costs.

SONITROL was able to take a challenging situation—network decommissioning—and turn it into an opportunity to achieve winning outcomes. With the help of T-Mobile for Business, the migration to the new T-Mobile network is helping SONITROL accelerate their product roadmap, retain franchises and customers, build trust, and maintain their industry leadership.

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