AT&T

Fleet managers for telecommunications carriers are responsible for a lot more than the ubiquitous pickup trucks and vans that wear their companies’ logos.

From specially outfitted light-duty models spec’d to function as mobile cell sites to heavy-duty pickups built to carry equipment to remote tower sites, telecom fleets are some of the most diverse in the commercial truck space.

And when it comes to actually building cell towers, the diversity expands; companies that specialize in these structures need everything from flatbeds and 40-ton cranes to heavy-lift helicopters to build the infrastructure that supports devices commercial and retail users rely on every day.

“We have hundreds of special vehicles we can move around the country to temporarily replace or reinforce existing cell sites,” said Chuck Hamby, a spokesman for Verizon Wireless in Tampa. And there is an entertaining array of barnyard acronyms used to label these vehicles. A cow, or cell on wheels, is a truck equipped with an antenna powerful enough to fill in coverage when a cell site has been damaged or destroyed.

“We might send a cow to a cell tower whose antenna was destroyed in a hurricane. We’d park it right next to the tower, hook it up to the existing power source, and the cow would function as a tower,” he said.