Heartland Connect unified GIS, permitting, and construction crews on one workflow — accelerating last-mile fiber delivery across rural counties while keeping municipalities informed at every stage.
Heartland Connect is building fiber-to-the-home across 34 rural counties in Kansas and Nebraska — 280,000 passings funded by federal broadband grants with strict milestone deadlines. The challenge was not trenching fiber. It was coordinating GIS, county permits, utility locates, and three construction crews who often arrived at the same block without knowing the other was coming.
James Whitfield’s deployment team relied on a GIS system updated weekly and permit trackers maintained in spreadsheets by county. A crew in Mitchell County trenched 400 feet along a road easement that the GIS showed as clear — the permit was approved for the opposite side of the street. Rework cost a week and strained the county relationship.
We were building world-class fiber infrastructure with last-century project coordination. Grants do not forgive missed milestones.
Netisen connected Heartland’s GIS, permit management, and crew dispatch into a single deployment platform. Every block has a status: design, permit pending, locate complete, construction, splicing, activation. Municipal liaisons log into a read-only portal showing progress in their jurisdiction — reducing the status-call burden on Whitfield’s team.
The same county that flagged the easement error became a reference customer. Their liaison praised the municipal portal in a state broadband office meeting. Heartland hit Q3 passings targets for the first time in the program — 45% more homes passed per month than the prior quarter average.
Permit rework dropped because applications were validated against GIS before submission. Crews stopped duplicating locates because the platform showed who was scheduled on each block.
Energy & utilities
Pacific Northwest Electric Cooperative
When outage calls stacked up faster than crews could dispatch, Pacific Northwest Electric replaced siloed SCADA dashboards with one live control plane — giving operators and field teams the same picture of the grid.
Logistics & ports
NorthSea Container Terminal
NorthSea Container Terminal modeled berths, cranes, and inland logistics together — cutting vessel wait times and reducing idle emissions across one of Europe’s highest-volume shipping corridors.
Government & cities
City of Riverside
Riverside deployed adaptive signals at 180 intersections — smoothing rush-hour corridors and giving planners evidence-backed data for long-term street redesigns.
Talk with our team about how Netisen helps infrastructure organizations ship resilient platforms — on time and at scale.