Verizon Pitches Its Wireless Network to Remote Oil Drillers

Driving 300 miles from Billings, Mont., to Williston, N.D., Mark Bartolomeo was a long way from home. A vice president at Verizon Communications, the New Jersey resident was making the trip to scout for customers. Dotted with sagebrush, the rangeland of eastern Montana doesn’t have many potential Verizon smartphone users, even as the area has become one of the fastest-growing oil regions in the U.S. But Bartolomeo wasn’t there for the people—he was there for the machines. “It’s amazing, when you look around out here and see the massive amounts of equipment everywhere,” he says.

Verizon has installed as many as 17 new cellular towers to extend its LTE wireless coverage throughout Montana and North Dakota, Bartolomeo says. His company is pitching its wireless infrastructure as a network for drilling companies’ Web-capable smart sensors and pumps. The idea is that a reliable Internet connection will make it cheaper for drillers to automate more of their operations, creating machine-to-machine (M2M) connections that let human overseers monitor and tweak systems from afar.