Across North America, thousands of municipalities rely on remote monitoring systems to protect critical water and wastewater infrastructure. These systems keep lift stations pumping, prevent sewage overflows, and alert operators when something goes wrong, often in locations miles from the nearest treatment plant.
For decades, the connectivity underpinning these systems was simple: a copper telephone line and an auto dialer. But the plain old telephone service (POTS) that carried those alarms is being quietly retired. Telcos are raising prices, deprioritizing repairs, and shutting down copper infrastructure. For operators responsible for public health and environmental compliance, this is a growing operational risk.
RACO Manufacturing has been building remote monitoring and alarm systems since 1948. Now, they’re integrating cellular connectivity with satellite failover to ensure critical alarms always get through.
RACO: 75 Years of Keeping Infrastructure Online
RACO’s story starts in California’s Central Valley, where founder Roland Buchanan built alarm systems for farmers. Over the following decades, the company evolved from agricultural radio controls into a specialist provider of remote monitoring and alarm notification systems for water and wastewater operations.
Today, RACO has over 30,000 RTUs (remote terminal units) in its operational install base, logging more than 100 million monitoring hours annually. Their customers include municipal water departments, county utilities, and some of the biggest names in the water industry.
The thread that runs through nearly eight decades of RACO’s history is a relentless focus on reliability. Their customers are conservative operators running mission-critical infrastructure, and they value dependability above everything else.
That conservatism runs deep. RACO’s flagship Verbatim autodialer, first shipped in the 1980s, is still actively requested by customers today even as the company tries to move toward newer, connected products.
“People still call and say, ‘My Verbatim’s dying, give me the same exact device I bought in 1988 that works over the telephone service,'” says Chris Rappoli, VP of Product at RACO. “They don’t want AI; features — they want reliability.”
The Problem: POTS Lines Are Disappearing
That loyalty to the Verbatim was built on the reliability of the copper landline network. But the infrastructure those customers depend on is eroding. Telecom providers are moving away from POTS, and the consequences are real: higher line rental costs, slower outage repairs, and growing uncertainty about long-term availability.
To understand why this matters so much, it helps to picture RACO’s most common deployment. Their bread-and-butter application is monitoring lift stations; the small, dispersed pumping stations that keep sewage moving through collection systems. Wastewater flows downhill through miles of pipe, but it can only go downhill for so long before the pipe is unmanageably deep. Lift stations pump the sewage back up at intervals, and the cycle repeats until it reaches the treatment plant.
These stations are spread across neighborhoods, rural areas, and everywhere in between. If a pump fails or water levels rise too high, the result can be sewage overflow, causing an environmental hazard and a regulatory violation.
The challenge is these assets are too critical to leave unmonitored, too dispersed for traditional monitoring systems, and now losing the connectivity backbone they were built on.
The Solution: Cellular + Satellite Failover with Blues
RACO’s answer is the Verbatim Gen 2, their first new hardware product in over a decade. It’s built with the Blues Notecard for cellular connectivity and Starnote for Skylo for satellite backup, and it’s designed to carry RACO’s customer base from the POTS era into a converged connectivity future.
The architecture is deliberately pragmatic. During normal operation, all data data such as water levels, pump status, and channel readings, flows over cellular. Satellite only enters the picture when it matters most: if an alarm triggers and cellular can’t deliver it within one minute, the system automatically falls back to satellite to push the notification through.
“Our intent is to never use satellite,” says Rappoli. “We have it there as a high-quality backup which guarantees reliability, this package resonates with our customers.”
The choice to build on Blues wasn’t just about the satellite capability. RACO doesn’t employ dedicated firmware engineers, they work with product development agencies and needed a connectivity platform that abstracted away the low-level modem complexity their team had been wrestling with for years. Previous products required managing raw modem drivers, handling edge cases like daylight savings time changes, and troubleshooting issues with limited support from modem vendors.
Notecard’s JSON-based API and plug-and-play architecture offered the right level of abstraction for a company focused on building monitoring products, not managing wireless infrastructure.
Blues’ enterprise support program also proved valuable during implementation, giving RACO access to engineering expertise they didn’t have in-house. “It’s almost like having extra engineers on staff with the right expertise,” Rappoli adds.
Join the Conversation
For equipment manufacturers, systems integrators, and infrastructure operators looking to understand how satellite failover is changing the economics and reliability of remote monitoring, RACO’s journey from POTS lines to cellular + satellite offers practical, real-world insight you won’t find in a product datasheet.
Join RACO Manufacturing and Blues for a fireside chat on Wednesday, April 1st at 1 PM ET / 6 PM GMT, where we’ll dive into:
- Why RACO chose to integrate cellular + satellite into their next-generation monitoring hardware
- What integrating Starnote for Skylo looked like from an engineering perspective
- How satellite failover performs in real-world critical infrastructure deployments
- The business impact of offering always-on connectivity to risk-averse infrastructure customers
Can’t make it? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording.