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Agribusiness
No More Driving for Signal: How CommsXtend Fixed Dropped Calls
Roscoe Taggart, Farm Manager, New Zealand
Roscoe Taggart is a Farm Manager on a 732-hectare arable and finishing property near Cust, in the middle of the Canterbury Plains, New Zealand.
▶ Watch Roscoe's story (1:51)
Connected Farms deployed CommsXtend® across the farm, extending coverage to areas that previously had none.
"A lot of what we do now is technology based, being able to access and use it anywhere on the farm... there is efficiencies being picked up everywhere," Taggart says.
Dropped calls used to be a daily frustration, with no pattern to where reception failed - Taggart would drive to a known good spot just to make an important call. With CommsXtend®, calls hold reliably across the farm, and with Bluetooth connectivity he can stay on the move and keep working through calls rather than stopping to find signal.
Transcript
The CommsXtend - you don't drop the phone calls. I know certain spots around our farm where the calls would just drop every time, and it was just issues. I'm Rosco Taggert, third generation on our family farm. We farm 732 hectares, primarily arable, but we do a finishing component as well. We farm near Cust, which is more or less in the middle of the Canterbury Plains, and we get terrible reception everywhere.
We cannot hold phone calls. They drop out all over the place, and you don't have any 4G data or anything like that. There seems to be no rhyme or reason where the good spots are or the bad spots, but it's certainly quite frustrating from a management point of view. I spend most of my day on the phone or using my phone for various data‑using exercises.
Immediate benefits of the CommsXtend — you don't drop the phone calls. That was the first one that I really noticed on using it. You just didn't drop the phone calls like we used to. I know certain spots around our farm where the calls would just drop every time, and it was just no issues. It worked perfectly.
Having good connectivity on the farm is just so important for efficiencies, and certainly a lot of what we do is app‑based now and technology‑based. Being able to access and use all of the apps anywhere on the farm there's just efficiency to be picked up all over the place, there really is. It's actually amazing how much time it saved me. I used to drive to spots where I knew I had reception to make important phone calls, but now, particularly with the Bluetooth technology, you can just constantly be working and on the run and not having to stop and worry about phone calls.
It's just you're connected the whole time.
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