High Data, Zero Downtime: Fieldin's Successful Shift to Autonomous with Hologram
Our business can't afford downtime. With Hologram, latency is very low. We don't lose signal. It works.
The challenge: Strong connectivity for farming innovation
Fieldin, the world's largest smart farm operations company for high-value crops, provides farmers visibility and valuable insights to improve farming efficiency. Key to their success is strong connectivity, which can support data transmission from machinery in the field.
“We’ve installed telematics IoT devices on over 5,000 farm vehicles, which constantly feed data into the cloud for analysis,” says Yonatan Horovitz, Co-founder & Chief Autonomy Officer at Fieldin. “We need live visibility on exactly where the machinery is driving, and what has happened in the last shift, last day, last week, last year.”
Beyond its core products, Fieldin is making strides toward its vision of fully autonomous farming, which requires higher data volumes.
“Once we transitioned into autonomy, there was a need to send more data,” says Horovitz. “This is why we need a high bandwidth solution, in order to investigate everything, to collect the raw data. We don't need live data, but we do need to upload a lot of data to better understand exactly what happened and if something hasn’t happened properly to investigate it properly.”
To meet this challenge and maintain strong connectivity, the team required a dependable connectivity partner.
“The problem with agriculture is that you don’t have good connectivity everywhere,” says Horovitz. “Different network providers may be the better choice, even in one area of a farm versus another. And, we don’t know which beforehand. We need to have one provider that provides us the ability to toggle and connect to all the networks that are available.”
Putting a Hologram SIM in every machine
Fieldin chose Hologram as their go-to partner for connectivity. Today, every Fieldin machine in Israel, Australia, and the United States is equipped with a Hologram SIM card.
The choice of Hologram's Hyper SIM allows the machines to switch between network providers as required, ensuring reliable performance – even with high data volumes.
“Hologram gives us the ability to switch networks as needed and work with one vendor, not a lot of vendors,” says Horovitz. “We can have modems with one SIM, keeping costs lower and reducing the complexity of the system.”
Fieldin leverages several of Hologram’s product features:
Premium support
“The team is very responsive – every issue or request that we have, they respond to immediately,” says Horovitz.
Fleet management
Fieldin monitors its devices using the Hologram dashboard, identifying and troubleshooting any that stop transmitting as well as managing operations by allocating different devices to specific programs.
Preflight
Using Preflight, Fieldin set up and tested each unit before the SIM cards were activated. “This has been really helpful for our autonomous rollout,” said Dikla Atar, Fieldin's Information Systems Team Leader.
Hologram delivers reliable global performance
After many years of working with Hologram, Fieldin has experienced zero service disruptions.
"Our business can't afford downtime," says Horovitz. "With Hologram, latency is very low in areas with good connectivity. We don't lose signal. It works."
With a single vendor for their connectivity needs, Horovitz says the partnership also translates into cost savings by reducing hardware costs and simplifying vendor management.
As Fieldin continues to scale, they plan to expand their relationship with Hologram. “We are growing fast in the last year,” says Horovitz.
“Every device that we install will have a Hologram SIM. Ultimately, it feels like Hologram wants us to succeed. They know that if we succeed, we grow. In that way, our collaboration is a win-win and a true partnership.”Download the case study
