With so much opportunity in Turkey, it is an exciting new business arena for Cradlepoint, with our specialisation in fully PCI-compliant network failover solutions includes features such as Out-of-Band Management and products to meet the needs of consumer, business, and M2M-IoT applications.
Spotlighting Carlo's Bakery in response to their evolving technology, the company turned to Cradlepoint’s ARC Series and NetCloud Manager (NCM) SaaS management platform for necessary failover redundancy and cellular LTE required for day-to-day operations.
In this three part blog series, I will cover examples and use cases of wireless technology changing our lives in very unexpected ways. This first installment touches on a unique solution for a certain dirty animal difficulty.
Cradlepoint’s NetCloud Manager has proven itself to be a really good way to manage network connectivity for small-footprint distributed enterprises. Now transportation-related organizations like emergency services, police, shipping, metropolitan buses, school buses, taxis, and commercial fleets are discovering the benefits of NCM as well. One of the main reasons why is because NetCloud Manager makes the deployment, management, and monitoring of vehicle fleets very easy.
Cradlepoint has watched with great interest as network operators’ deployments of 4G-LTE infrastructure have been gaining momentum in EMEA. Over the last several years, this momentum has resulted in savvy EMEA partners and customers contacting Cradlepoint’s USA operations for help in bringing the advantages of 4G-LTE networking solutions to the EMEA market.
In my previous blog post (link to “The Quest for Five 9s Making For Strange Bedfellows”), I mentioned how many of our enterprise customers are now achieving continuous (AKA “Five 9s” or 99.999%) network connectivity with wireless alone. In most cases, they do it by using two cell carriers per branch location. (If Carrier A’s network goes down, the routing device switches to Carrier B until Carrier A comes back online).
Today I’d like to discuss three facts that are leading to a tectonic shift in cellular carrier business practices, and the implications of this shift:
Fact One: The world of cellular carriers is fiercely competitive.
(After having spent 17 years with one of the largest cellular carriers, I can assure you it’s true.)
As I noted in a November 2013 blog post (Is LTE the Winner? Follow the Money), the wireless carrier industry continues to be “engaged in a kind of horse race to see who would be first to offer the best, broadest, and most powerful LTE network.”
The most recent twist in the race concerns the proposed merger of T-Mobile and Sprint. As of August 6th, 2014 Sprint announced they were calling it off and long-time CEO Dan Hesse has been replaced. In the realm of LTE giants, these two companies rank well below both Verizon and AT&T with respect to numbers of subscribers. (There are other measurement criteria, which I’ll discuss in a later post.) Combined, however, the new company would have been on more equal footing—with about 100 million subscribers versus the other two companies’ 110-120 million. With less than half the subscribers of either AT&T or Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile lag their larger competitors in LTE network build-outs and the main rationale for the merger was to gain parity with their larger competitors.
Let's face it. For distributed enterprises, establishing and maintaining fast and secure networks at the edge is no easy task, especially in a world where hackers are more sophisticated than ever, and greater demands are being placed on the network for high performance and bandwidth. Today's branch locations process highly sensitive data but don't have onsite IT to perform hands on system monitoring to watch for attacks or connectivty outages. ......
Common among today’s business leaders is the topic of agility and the need to stay ahead of the competition. But naturally, as the conversation moves from C-level executives to the ones responsible for implementing so called “agility” the conversation shifts. It shifts from discussing the benefits that include cost savings, greater return on investment and greater efficiencies to the challenges of bringing those benefits to fruition. Regardless of market sector, the challenges typically relate back to the foundational technology, its ability to adapt, and for today’s IT professional, a myriad of security concerns.