Question 1

1. At what site count should a CPO move off spreadsheets onto a dedicated charging management platform?

Accepted Answer

Most operators feel the pain by site 4 or 5 — the point where one person can no longer physically check every charger daily. Moving to a centralized monitoring dashboard before that is usually premature; waiting past 8–10 sites is usually too late.

Question 2

2. What's the real difference in support model between a single site and a multi-city network?

Accepted Answer

A single site can run on one phone number reaching whoever's closest. A multi-city network needs tiered support (triage, technical, account management) with tracked SLAs, because tickets have to survive staff turnover, time zones and contractual response-time commitments to B2B clients.

Question 3

3. Does pricing really need to change as a network grows, or is one tariff simpler?

Accepted Answer

One tariff is right for the pilot — there isn't enough session data yet to justify complexity. By the regional-cluster phase, a workplace site and a highway site in the same city already have different demand curves; by multi-city scale, customer segment (retail vs. fleet vs. roaming) adds another pricing axis a spreadsheet can't manage safely across dozens of sites.

Question 4

4. Is reported uptime a reliable measure of network quality at scale?

Accepted Answer

Not on its own. The 2025 ChargerHelp Annual Reliability Report found reported uptime of 98.7%–99.9% across the networks it studied, while independent first-time charge success rates were closer to 71%, falling further as stations age. First-time charge success — not headline uptime — is the metric that actually tracks driver experience.

Question 5

5. Do multi-city CPOs need OCPI roaming and open APIs from day one?

Accepted Answer

No — roaming and deep API integrations are a phase-2/phase-3 need, not a pilot-stage one. What matters at the pilot stage is choosing a platform that supports roaming and API access later without a system migration once the network actually needs it.

multi-city ev charging

How To Scale An EV Charging Network From One Site To Many Cities