Tridon Communications | The Transformative Solution Provider | Ben Thompson

Tridon Communications started its journey as a wireless service provider, primarily working with Motorola and Kenwood as partners in the push-to-talk land mobile radio market. It has since expanded into other wireless domains such as WiSP services, cyber security, and AI. In recent years, with the expansion of telecommunications in sectors like video surveillance (CCTV), security alarms, oil and gas, mining, video analytics, cyber security, and agriculture. Most notably, Tridon Communications naturally grew into the wired communications market, providing OSP, Civil Construction, and Structured cabling solutions.

Building A Brand

Carrying over 41 years of industry experience, it has partners in various industries and ensures the services of one partner can be used to support another and vice versa. For example, Tridon Communications has several strategic partnerships in the telecommunications space which gives it a leading technology advantage and the potential to create even greater opportunities to provide its clients with solutions that provide efficiencies and pathways for greater data analytics, faster networks and can support its clients with any telecommunication needs in the digital world today. One of those strategic partnerships is with Motorola. Motorola is an industry leader in land mobile radio, security cameras and access control, cyber security, private LTE and much more. One of the products from the Motorola and Tridon portfolio is the Avigilon brand and product line. When Motorola brought Avigilon to the table Tridon was able to expand its portfolio to provide security support with extremely high quality camera systems with leading edge video analytics. Avigilon has market-leading video analytics that support Motorola’s Safety Reimagined. When cameras detect unusual activity, security alerts are automatically activated, allowing immediate action. Proactive systems provide real-time security alerts, but most competitors use reactive systems. These reactive systems can fix problems after identifying them by analysis, so real-time detection cannot be done. Tridon has succeeded with this solution in Airports, Schools, Health Care, Oil, Gas, and Rail.

Another excellent example of how telecommunications and agriculture have recently come together is represented well with a pilot project Tridon recently had the privilege of executing for an organization called Agriplay. Agriplay is taking advantage of a portion of the vacant downtown tower real estate in different cities and putting it to different use in the form of urban farming.

This organization seeks to reinvent the agriculture industry with vertical farming in vacant towers in downtown cores across the globe. Growing towers in these structures were filled with smaller plants, like cucumber and pepper. Automation was used in the project to keep track of the exact timing and dosage of water or nutrients given to the plants. Lighting and temperature is optimized through data analytics to provide the ideal growing condition mimicking ecosystems that exist in different locations around the globe. This brilliant initiative solves several problems. First, it tackles the 100-mile challenge so residents can, at some point in the future, acquire all their vegetables from grocery stores that receive this produce from a local facility based in the downtown core. Second, it seeks to fill spaces that were formerly vacant. Most importantly, this initiative does it all using low energy. Each grow tower operates on 4 CAT 6A Cables consuming only 260 watts of power.

“In another scenario; if you are in a camp in the Oil Sands, chances are the network you are watching TV on or using to face time your families was installed by one of our techs. There are devices on a network transmitting and receiving billions of bites of information per second to provide predictive analytics so an industrial site can run safer or more efficiently,” explains Ben. “We have telecommunications towers in the heart of many communities we serve. Intelligent lighting solutions that turn lights on and off when a person is either in or out of the office to reduce the amount of power consumption providing an effective tool to combat climate change.” What Tridon does is vital to everyone they do it for in some fashion. “Communication is the important thing we do in every part of our personal and professional lives today. As a result of Telecommunications, information is available at the tips of your fingers in a flash like never before. And it is Telecommunications Systems Integrators like Tridon that make that possible,” adds Ben.

Towards the Future

OT Cyber Security has been a big push for Tridon organization in recent years. Utilizing technology to aggregate information from the “Data Lake” is essential to extracting the information a company wants and needs to effectively operate their business. “On top of this, we have seen a big push in physical security. Taking our already qualified technicians to now install Cameras and Access control has seen a lot of growth,” says Ben. “But it goes much further than just putting a camera up, and it’s the integration of this solution into what can sometimes be a complex network so we can be proactive, safer, more efficient and preventative instead of reactive.”

Tridon’s approach to teamwork has helped propel them into an entirely new category. As a TSI, they perform 98% of the telecommunications scope of work in-house, which is unheard of in the industry. As a result, Tridon’s partners and clients have one hand to shake, making significant and minor projects considerably more efficient. More importantly, engaging Tridon to properly design and engineer a Telecommunications Solution right the first time has helped us a great deal with having clients return to them repeatedly.

“Our Engineering group has a motto. ‘We don’t like change orders, and neither should you, so let us get it right the first time’ Achieving this involves proactive engagement with our partners and clients alike,” elucidates Ben. “Proactive engagement is critical to your telecommunications success. The most important part of the hotel you stay in the weekend, the office building you worked in this week, or the industrial plant refining everything from pulp and paper to potash or oil and gas to uranium is your Telecommunications Network. It cannot be an afterthought or a footnote at the bottom of a drawing saying, “please include telecoms,” with no content. Take some time to do it right. Work with Tridon to get your budget within plus or minus 10-15%. “At Tridon we strive to be the best in the industry and every day we are looking for better ways to provide the best in class solutions for all of our clients network and security needs,” says Ben. “WE ARE THE SOLUTION!”