Rahal Letterman Lanigan has been a staple of IndyCar for decades. That's racing legend Bobby Rahal, late night legend David Letterman, and businessman Mike Lanigan, a team with multiple Indy 500 wins to its name. So when RLL Racing reached out to us for help with their network, we said yes right away.
They handed us two jobs. The first is the one every IT person is going to feel in their gut. The second sounded almost impossible the first time we heard it. Here's how both of them went.
Job one: the Cisco Meraki renewal nobody wants to sign
RLL's headquarters in Indianapolis was running on aging Cisco Meraki gear, and they were racing toward a brutal licensing renewal just to keep the lights on. Anyone who has run a Meraki shop knows the feeling. The hardware works fine, but the licenses expire, and when they do the gear stops forwarding traffic. On top of the renewal, a good chunk of their equipment was going end of life, so they were looking at buying new hardware just to keep paying for the privilege of keeping it. Add it all up and it was a six-figure bill coming due, locking them in for years.
So our first job was to completely rip out the Meraki core and replace it with Peplink.
We spent months before the trip designing the solution and planning every detail so the on-site work would go smoothly. We unboxed, staged, configured, and labeled every device before it ever went in a rack. Then we did the part you can only do after hours. A three-person Crosstalk crew put in an eighteen-hour day pulling Meraki and sliding Peplink in behind it, switch by switch, testing as we went. Whoever installed the original network left clean cabling, clear labels, and even a gap in the rack, and that made the cutover a lot easier. The staff walked in the next morning to a network that just worked.
At the center of it now sits a Peplink Balance 1350 EC. It's honestly more router than headquarters will ever need, with dual hot-swappable power supplies so a dead supply never takes the network down. That matters on race day. But the real reason we picked it is what it can do for the track, and that's where job two comes in.
Not everything was frictionless, and I'll be honest about that. A couple of the new switches pegged their CPUs once all the Meraki access points were plugged in, so we sent diagnostics to Peplink and left the APs on one remaining Meraki switch as a clean bridge until RLL phases in Peplink APs over the coming months. That's the reality of open-heart surgery on a live network. You plan for a clean swap, and you handle the surprises when they show up.
The payoff is that the recurring Peplink cost is closer to an extended warranty than a ransom note. No more watching a licensing renewal creep up on the calendar every year with a bigger number attached.
Job two: one fiber feed, every location, in real time
The hardest part of race day connectivity is distribution. Every track hands each team a single fiber feed. It carries live race telemetry, car position data, and camera feeds from around the venue. It's on the team to take that one feed and get it everywhere at once, in real time.
Everywhere means a lot of places. The engineering trucks parked in the paddock. The timing stands down in the pits for three or four different Indy cars. The viewing stands for sponsors. Even the fuel rigs. And it has to reach all the way back to the Race Operations Center at headquarters in Indianapolis. As Andrew Hughes, who runs IT for RLL, put it, if any of that gets delayed the engineers are flying blind, and that's never a good thing when strategy is being called lap by lap.
The complication is the connections themselves. Every one of those locations is on a completely different internet connection. It might be the track's fiber, or Starlink, or 5G cellular, or Wi-Fi as WAN off a nearby truck. And each one needs a backup in case the primary drops mid-race.
The short version of how we solved it: every truck, stand, and fuel rig gets its own Peplink router with two or more internet connections. Peplink SpeedFusion ties all of them back to that Balance 1350 EC at headquarters, and they all share a single Layer 2 broadcast domain. So every device, no matter where it physically sits, lives on the same virtual subnet. That one fiber feed from the track reaches every truck, every stand, and headquarters as if it were all plugged into the same switch sitting in one room.
Layer 2 bridging by itself isn't unique to Peplink. Plenty of vendors can draw that on a whiteboard. Doing it reliably, in real time, over a bonded mix of fiber, 5G, Starlink, and Wi-Fi that is different at every location and prone to dropping, that is where SpeedFusion pulls ahead. In my experience it's the only realistic way to hold a single multicast telemetry and camera broadcast together across that many unpredictable connections at once. I'm not aware of another vendor that can do it.
Proving it at Long Beach
A lab demo is one thing. You control the variables. A real remote deployment is a completely different animal, so we took it to the Long Beach Grand Prix to watch it work in the wild. Every track RLL's IT team walks into is a bit of an unknown. They have to adapt to whatever network handoff the venue gives them, and on a tight street circuit that handoff can be unreliable. That's where the cellular and Starlink redundancy earns its keep, keeping the feed alive when the primary connection drops. It held up. RLL now has solid communication between the pit, the paddock, and the folks back home in Indianapolis.
This is the engineering behind Crosstalk Mobile
This is where Crosstalk Mobile comes in. The cellular failover that keeps those trucks and stands online when the track fiber drops is the exact problem we built Crosstalk Mobile to solve. We're an authorized T-Mobile MVNO with truly unlimited 5G data SIMs, routers, and antennas built for mobility, backed by the same engineers who designed the RLL network.
You don't have to be running an IndyCar team to need connectivity that doesn't quit. Whether you're keeping a business online through an ISP outage, working from an RV, or deploying for clients, the approach is the same one we used for RLL. Build in real redundancy so no single connection can take you down, and make sure there's an actual engineer to call when something goes sideways.
If that's the kind of connectivity you need, take a look at our unlimited 5G plans or call or text us at 888-381-7750 and talk to a real network engineer, not a salesperson. We're happy to walk you through it.
