Rural, suburban, and urban communities face difficult infrastructure challenges.Scarce resources, federal and state mandates, overworked staff, challengingtechnical obstacles, and limited budgets are just some of the hurdles municipalwaste departments currently face. Many municipalities face these same challenges,but added one more of their own: mountainous terrain. The design and operation of the City of Scottsdale, Arizona's wastewater system was made more difficultby the rugged terrain. The expense and difficulty of communicating with numerouspipeline pump lift stations required a near-real time monitoring and alarmcapability. In particular, several lift stations were critical to systemoperation. A failure at one of the bottom stations would lead to unacceptabledischarge. A reliable monitoring and notification system was needed. Ideally, asingle-source supplier would be responsible for the hardware, software, datacollection, transmission, and distribution. SPATIA, a satellite communicationssystem met this criteria.