Nov. 11 – National Carriers has chosen American Mobile Satellite Corp.’s integrated terrestrial/satellite Multi-Mode Mobile Messaging Service. The carrier will deploy 1,000 of the units in its owner-operator refrigerated trucks.
The company’s largest account is National Beef, which operates plants in Liberal and Dodge City, KS. The challenge facing National Carriers was how to minimize the number of miles its drivers spent returning to the National Beef plants with empty trucks. The new messaging service was chosen to let the company better manage its backhaul routes.
“National Carriers trucks travel between the open farmlands of the Midwest and the skyscraper-dotted urban canyons of the Eastern seaboard,” says Mike McGee, vice president of marketing at AMSC. “Delivering integrated terrestrial and satellite capabilities, the Multi-Mode Mobile Messaging Service was designed to meet exactly these types of varied coverage requirements.”
National Carriers plans to install 500 Multi-Mode units by February 1999 and an additional 500 over the next five years. Previously, the company used a combination of pagers and cellular phones to communicate between dispatchers and drivers.