Max: 00:07 This is, IT Broker Tech Deep Dive. I’m Max Clark, and I’m here with Rich and Benjamin from Sierra Wireless. Today, we’re gonna learn about well, we’re gonna learn today, I’m gonna learn about, Sierra Wireless and what the heck is going on. And, you’re gonna you’re gonna be able to come along for the ride. So, Rich, before we get into your deck, why don’t you introduce yourself, Benjamin?
Max: 00:30 Say hi. Give me a little bit of background overview and that way I can level set and know who I’m hassling for the nerd questions and and the business questions.
Benjamin: 00:40 Sure. Thanks, Mark.
Max: 00:41 Well, it’s
Rich: 00:41 a pleasure to be here. So my name is Rich Barner.
Benjamin: 00:43 I’m a channel manager for Sierra Wireless, and I cover the western region of the US. And today, we’re gonna be talking to you about, Sierra Wireless a little bit broadly as a company and then more specifically honing in on our solution set that we have to, to Max and and his customer base, which is managed network services. So, Ben, if you’d like to introduce yourself as well.
Rich: 01:04 Yeah. Sure. So thanks for having me. My name is Benjamin Dunn, solutions architect and product manager for the M and S division of Sierra Wireless. I’m out of Atlanta, Georgia.
Rich: 01:12 I’ve been with Sierra Wireless for about, 10 years now. So, looking forward to having the conversation and, answering any questions you guys have.
Max: 01:19 10 years, man. You’re like a you’re like the old guy in tech. If if you’ve been with a company for 10 years, you know where all the bodies
Rich: 01:26 are buried. This is great. I do. And I’m only in my thirties. So, you know, I
Max: 01:30 got a got a lot a lot longer to go. Nothing quite like child labor in IT services. It’s fantastic. Rich, Rich, the floor is yours. Kick us off.
Benjamin: 01:38 Sure. So, Sierra Wireless. Let’s start with the company. So Sierra Wireless has been in the wireless space for almost 30 years now. We have a rich history of innovation.
Benjamin: 01:48 We have over 350 patents. We’ve also been a key contributor to a lot of the IoT standards that are in place today that, companies are benefiting from. If you look at Sierra as a whole, we’re a publicly traded company. We have global operations, and we’re really ubiquitous around the world. We have a 160,000,000 devices shipped, 2,000,000 plus wireless subscriptions.
Benjamin: 02:08 So very extensive. If you look at what Sierra Wireless is and what what our DNA is, we really are comprised of 3 pillars. So, we’re a manufacturer at heart. We, manufacture cellular gateways that include modems, routers, as well as cellular modules or chipsets that even have historically found their way into, some of our competitors’ devices like Cisco and Cradlepoint.
Max: 02:31 Okay.
Benjamin: 02:31 And then we also have an IoT managed connectivity element as well.
Max: 02:36 So that’s the discrepancy between devices shipped and wireless subscriptions as you’re building the chipsets and parts that other people are putting into their equipment.
Benjamin: 02:43 Yeah. That’s right. So while we have a very deep and wide portfolio in the IoT space, what we’re here to talk to you about today is our managed cellular, broadband solution, which is called Managed Network Services or MNS. So, MNS in its most simple form is fully managed wireless broadband. What it consists of is if you look at the pinwheel on the right hand corner, there’s 5 service elements.
Benjamin: 03:07 So we’re gonna provide the the hardware, which will consist of a Sierra Wireless modem. We are the OEM, and that’s a rarity in our space. You won’t find a Cradlepoint, or another competitor like that that has a managed service offering like Sierra. But we’ll provide the hardware. We’ll provide the antennas, which can be, panel antenna or a premium external MIMO antenna.
Benjamin: 03:29 We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But in addition to the hardware, we’re also paired with that the cellular connectivity, 4g, 5g through Verizon, AT and T, and T Mobile. We partner with them domestically. We can also deliver services in Canada through Rogers. And then with the hardware and the connectivity, we will also provide professional installation and then go on to proactively monitor the service and manage it 247, 365 with US based technical support.
Benjamin: 03:57 So the value that MNS brings is that it’s really a single vendor approach. Obviously, you know, someone could go and procure, you know, a wireless modem directly from the carrier like a Verizon or AT and T. But that’s gonna be presented with several challenges. Obviously, Verizon, AT and T, T Mobile is extensive with their networks are. It does not cover the entire US.
Benjamin: 04:19 So there’s that challenge there. And, obviously, also, you’re single threaded with that carrier. So if there’s a failure, you’re completely down until that carrier gets you up and running. With our solution, we have all 3 carriers are at our disposal. So that includes up to over 99% of US, domestically 96%, and Canada.
Benjamin: 04:39 And so we can get coverage to any location. We’re not dependent on any single carrier’s network. And we also have a dual SIM, technology, which enables us to have protection to be able to fail over to a secondary device or secondary carrier in the event that there’s a, you know, a a situation with the primary carrier’s connectivity.
Max: 05:00 How much of that do you have to do upfront and how much of that is just, you know, in the equipment ready to go? And I what I mean by that is, does a company have to give you, like, the lat long hornet of, of where this box is gonna get shipped out? And you’re gonna look at it and say, oh, you know, we think T Mobile has a good tower here, so we’re gonna do T Mobile and then we’re gonna do AT and T or AT and T. Or, are you just prepopulating your equipment with SIMs and and shipping them out? And is that completely agnostic and transparent?
Rich: 05:30 Yeah. I I can I can take that? So we we actually we ship our devices out with with SIMS preloaded in there. But but before we actually, you know, ship the devices out, we will do an RF analysis, you know, of the geographical location. But even because a cell map or a propagation map or some tool on the web says, okay.
Rich: 05:46 This carrier has the best coverage in this location. You may get there and there may be capacity issues or something, you know, at the local serving tower. So, you know, another serving tower from another carrier could provide a better user experience. So with that, since we shipped the device out with all 3 SIMs, and we ship them, we provide professional installation as well, and we oversee the installation process, we can then test the other carriers at at time of install. Cool.
Rich: 06:09 Okay.
Benjamin: 06:10 So so going back to value. So the other issue is if you, you know, have, you know, if you’re working direct with the carriers, you’re gonna have, like I mentioned, multiple care if you have lots of locations, you’re gonna have to have multiple, you know, carrier relationships with Verizon, AT and T Mobile. You won’t know who will be best. And so that’s, you know, with Verizon, AT and T Mobile. You won’t know who will be best, and so that’s a value that we have.
Benjamin: 06:28 And then you’re gonna have to be juggling multiple bills, multiple account teams, multiple data plans, and then different tech support, you know, that you’re gonna have to reach out to. And so we again, bring that single vendor approach where you’re gonna have a single, bill and contract, project manager, account manager, and then one number that you’re reaching out to for support. So simplify that process. You have inherent in it that backup capability in us to be able to, determine who is, you know, the best carrier and and give you the best, solution at each location. We also have the ability through those multiple carriers to do a a common data pool irregardless of the carrier or the data plan that’s selected.
Benjamin: 07:09 And so that enables you to ensure that there’s no data that’s wasted. You know? You’re not gonna have a bunch of sites that are deployed, especially in the backup scenario, right, where maybe only 5 or 10% of your sites might fail, with other carriers just paying for those data plans and they’re sitting there idle. With us, we can, you know, pull that all together in a common data plan, and all the sites can draw from it. It really enables them to pick a low data plan, understanding that it’s gonna aggregate to enough to accommodate those few locations that might fail on a given time.
Benjamin: 07:38 So it’s a very cost effective backup solution.
Max: 07:41 So is the primary application or is it still backup or people transitioning into using, you know, 4g5g with you for primary Internet? And if you’re moving into a primary, consumption becomes a question. Like, how do you what’s the actual, like, rating billing consumption model? Is it is it just consumption purely or do you have and give you people the ability to do, like, you know, the sites can be flat rate at this amount? Maybe it’s throttled after a threshold.
Rich: 08:06 Yeah. I’ll let you take that, Rich, and then I’ll follow-up. Yeah. So we we definitely are seeing primary use cases. In fact, you’re you’re getting a little bit ahead
Benjamin: 08:12 of me, Max. So, you know, these are the applications that we see in our space, and primary is absolutely one of them. Them. Particularly I mean, of course, everyone’s gonna, default to wired connection. Right?
Benjamin: 08:22 There’s it’s gonna be, a little bit more cost effective and not gonna be worried about having, you know, overages. Right? So there’s that preference there. But there’s certainly locations that are gonna be challenged to get connectivity, or maybe it’s new construction, it’s rural, whatever. We are, the go to option for for those scenarios.
Benjamin: 08:41 Again, because we cover over 99% of the US, you know, even rural areas. We it’s it’s amazing. You know, we do tons of coverage validation. I’ve yet to see where we haven’t been able to deliver to a particular location at least some type of connectivity. So so, yes, primary is is definitely on the table, especially with the advent of 5 g.
Benjamin: 09:01 We’re seeing speeds upwards of, 400 megabits down by, you know, 80 megabits up. Even our leading carriers, national average is a 150 megs down by 18 megs up. So, you know, wireless is definitely relevant today for a primary connection.
Rich: 09:15 Sorry. And I was just gonna add, you know, as far as the primary connectivity use cases go, you know, think outside the box of your typical, you know, retail chain restaurant, construction site, things of that. Think of, like, maybe an EV charging station or think of maybe, like, you know, these these, pharmaceutical lockers or these other brick and mortar stores that have lockers for, you know, picking up, you know, items, prescriptions, packages, things like that. And they’re placing these lockers in, you know, outdoor locations where, you know, you can’t just plug in the Ethernet or or or, you know, use a Wi Fi signal, where they need to get, you know, data transmitted, you know, to and from. So, again, it’s just more so about, you know, what sort of use cases can take advantage of wireless more so than a wireline.
Max: 09:54 So I mean, ATM machines, vending machines, ice ice, you know, vending on, you know, boat ramp docks. I mean, there’s there’s lots of those examples I’d imagine. Right?
Benjamin: 10:06 And we do have to answer your other question, Max, we do have fixed rate plans or we even use the word unlimited plans, in the industry, right, where, you know, there’s no true unlimited plan. It’s just like your, cellular plans. But, yeah, we do have fixed plans that eliminate that possibility for overage and variable bill. There’s still data plans associated with that. And once you exceed that data plan, then the carrier reserves the right to implement throttling, which will basically slow down your speed to, you know, crawl that basically limits how much more you can really attribute in the month.
Benjamin: 10:39 But, there are those options available. We also arm them with a portal, which we’ll get into in a little bit, enables them to see what their data utilization is at the given month, and they can make choices depending on how they want to action against that.
Max: 10:51 So how does that work with you? I mean, if you’re pulling the actual underlying dating plans and you’re and and you’re, serving as a layer, so the customer doesn’t really know is it AT and T or Verizon or whatever, right, or T Mobile? And, you know, it’s not like there’s a one to 1 you know, is is there a one to 1 contract at that point if a if a client wants, you know, an unlimited fixed rate? You know, well, unlimited. If they wanted a fixed rate plan at that location, we’re saying, okay.
Max: 11:17 Great. You’re gonna be on fixed rate with AT and T because that’s what it is and this is what it’s gonna cost. Or, you know, are are you I mean, how do you manage that? I I would be is my question.
Rich: 11:29 Yeah. Yeah. So what I’ll get into is, you know, we have our metered plans and then our our unlimited plans. Right? And so with our metered plans, you you know, we’ll just use a very simple example.
Rich: 11:37 Let’s say a customer has a 100 locations. Each one of those locations has a 1 gigabyte data plan. 33% of them are on Verizon, 33% on AT and T, 33% are on on T Mobile. That’s an overarching data pool of a 100 gigs, and the customer does not, you know, there’s no overcharge until they essentially exceed the entirety of their data pool. So no one individual data plan is gonna take them over, or have them paying overages until they, you know, go over the entirety of their data pool.
Rich: 12:02 But then when it comes to our unlimited plans, yeah, we have, you know, right now, we have a, you know, particular carrier that we work with with the unlimited data plans, and we’re gonna onboard, additional carriers. But all of the the pooling, the billing, you know, that’s kind of our our secret sauce that we do with our platform. So that way the carrier or sorry. The customer only gets one bill, in the and they get a report, you know, of all their their data usages and overages and data records and data usage trends. And they do know which carrier is at which site.
Rich: 12:30 You know, we’re we’re very transparent about that. But it just at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter. It’s still one bill to the customer.
Max: 12:35 So my my youngest brother this is a great story. My youngest brother moved to, literally, like, the the middle of nowhere on an island in in Pacific Northwest. And while they were struggling getting hooked up with, I think it was probably Comcast, you know, for Internet. He had a grandfathered unlimited plan with his cell phone carrier. I won’t say which one.
Max: 12:58 And and they realized that with a YAGI antenna pointed at the tower, they were getting over a 100 meg on this cell phone service and had his phone set up as a mobile hotspot and then linked in the and and it was like, you know, YouTube, Netflix working during the day. Everything was going on, streaming Spotify. And we used to joke that there was, like, an there was somebody’s office somewhere with a whiteboard with my brother’s name on it. Like, how much consumption was going on this tower? And you could just picture it because, I mean, we’re used to joke about, like, how much consumption he had in a given month.
Max: 13:28 And and surprisingly, you know, it was a lot. Like, they weren’t they weren’t being gentle with it, but it wasn’t that bad. But but I always kinda wonder, like, I wanna I wanna meet I wanna meet the person at the cell phone company and be like, what’s my what’s my brother’s name on your whiteboard of, like, cellular tower capacity and and what what was going on with that?
Rich: 13:50 Yeah. I remember when we first kind of, you know, started our relationship with Verizon. You know, they sent our our office a bunch of those old school jet packs.
Max: 13:58 Mhmm.
Rich: 13:58 And then, you know, we just we don’t know whose name they’re registered to, but we took, you know, a colleague and I, we used to actually were roommates together for a little while or early early professional days. And we just had that carry that jet Jetpack everywhere we went. You know, if we were going camping, if we were going on a, you know, late day on the boat, always use that Jetpack streaming music, streaming videos, whatever. And it worked for years where we probably use 100 and 100 and 100 of gigs, you know, over over the course, of the time that we had it. And then one day, it just got shut off because
Max: 14:27 Somebody finally caught you. Yeah. I mean, this was the inception of Twitch. I mean, Twitch was justin.tv. Right?
Max: 14:33 And he was walking around with this crazy apparatus, live streaming his life to the Internet. And, obviously, that pivot to Twitch was was a good one for them. So but yeah. Alright. Sorry.
Max: 14:45 Completely getting just, you know, sidetracked here. But
Benjamin: 14:48 Yeah. So, going back to the application. So, yes, primary is is a big one for us and temporary connectivity as well for that matter because we do offer, flexible month to month contracts. We do have your standard 3 to 1 year. We do 6 month, and we also do month to month.
Benjamin: 15:04 And, because it’s wireless, we’re not having to do construction and all that. We can get, installation in on on standard basis 7 to 10 business days. But with the paid expedite, we could have them as quick as 3 business days. So, you know, when you’re in having customers that are in situations where, an emergency crops up and and they need connectivity fast for whatever reason, we can we’re a great viable option to stand up service right away and even on a temporary basis. But a lot of times, that’ll you know, companies will start with us on that model, and they’ll see how quick and easy it was to deploy, how great the service was, and they’ll they’ll just roll it into, you know, a backup solution at that point, because it’s very cost effective to do so.
Benjamin: 15:46 And it also kinda gets the wheels turning in their mind about seeing other applications where they could put us in, and it just kinda grows from there. So, in fact, some of our largest accounts started off with just, a single site use case like that.
Max: 15:59 Yeah. Make people’s life easy. Right?
Benjamin: 16:01 Yeah. Yeah. But and, again, you know, besides the primary and temporary, like we talked about, backup is huge for us, you know, because, we didn’t hit on this. But another value of it being, you know, a great backup solution is because it is wireless. It’s really offering true true diversity.
Benjamin: 16:18 It’s over the air. You don’t have to be concerned about having your secondary connection with another carrier that’s diverse and potentially running over the same conduit or crossing paths at some point, and that cable seeking backhoe taking both your primary and secondary down. You know, we’re completely protected from that because it is over the air. So that’s why it’s great for backup. It’s and then also the fact that it is dual SIM and it has that backup component in it.
Benjamin: 16:43 I didn’t mention this, but besides it being dual SIM and having 2 SIM slots in there that we can, you know, remote into and switch over to that secondary SIM, we even have a 3rd SIM that’s safe to the side of the device so that in the event that there’s an issue with the second carrier, someone can manually go in and swap that 3rd SIM in, and they’re off to the races again. So as a backup provider, you don’t get better than wireless backup with us because you’re getting tertiary backup included in the solution automatically.
Max: 17:10 Okay.
Benjamin: 17:12 And then, you know, we talked about this too, but just to kinda reiterate. So anyone that needs Internet is is, you know, a a great customer for us. You know, so, you know, when you look at use cases and verticals, it it, you know, as far as specifically pinpoint. But where we see a lot of, you know, traction is specifically in the retail and food and beverage industry, for instance, because of the criticality of the meal to take, payment and, you know, some point of sale and applications that they need up and running to be able to run their business, makes us very, critical partner for those companies. Also, construction, just because of the nature of it, you know, you know, having new sites and not having available infrastructure in place today, That’s being able to stamp services right away on temporary basis is big for us.
Benjamin: 17:57 But we also see a lot with offices and been mentioned before kiosks, digital signage, and there’s still IoT plays, with their main service. And, of course, even just the the temporary nature of events and us being able to stamp services right away for those is a great, play for us as well.
Max: 18:11 Is your airplane in the POTS replacement space? You know, that’s become a really big issue for, you know, I mean, buildings that still have FireLife safety systems that have to plug into analog ports or POTS lines and cell phone I mean, not cell phone, traditional telcos decomming all their copper network as quickly as they possibly can. You know, it feels like a lot of people are transitioning to trying to do that over an LTE solution.
Rich: 18:34 Yeah. So from what I’ve learned, is there is, you know, a particular functionality that the box has to be able to do where it has to convert an analog signal over to that cellular data signal. So we don’t manufacture a box like that today. But it’s very much on our radar. However, we’ve had a partner that makes a box of that nature, but they need, you know, the the the cellular backhaul.
Rich: 18:58 So we’ve been, you know, thinking about partnering, with with a with a you know, with them, to provide that exact solution that that you’re talking about. So, you know, it’s one of those things, like, you know, if it’s if it’s doesn’t make sense to build it, then you just buy it.
Max: 19:10 And then the SIMs and these I’m I’m sure we’re gonna get into the devices in more detail. But from a network management standpoint, these are static IPs assigned to them, dynamic IPs assigned to them. What do you get from a, you know, network access if you needed remote access into these sites?
Rich: 19:26 Yeah. So we do, basically, 3 different 3 different ways. Right? So think about your typical cell phone. It’s a, you know, a private, IP with port address translation.
Rich: 19:36 A private dynamic IP with port address translation, you know, out altitude to the Internet. So, you know, that’s your very standard consumer grade, you know, SIM card and and and IP structure. So we offer that. We also offer public dynamic, IPs to where essentially you’re gonna have a static IP until the device reboots and then it’s gonna pull another IP from the IP pool, of the carrier. And then we also offer public static IPs, which is, you know, you know, I would say a pretty a good differentiator, that we offer within the market.
Rich: 20:07 And then we offer, you know, that with with our carriers. So for customers that that need, you know, need that that that particular type of IP, we don’t even upcharge for it. You know, it’s if that customer needs it, you know, we just provide it to them. So that those are the 3 types of, IP structures that we offer.
Max: 20:22 And so those IP addresses are bound to the box, and the box is doing that in inbound? Or if you’ve got an SD WAN or firewall, does that get assigned and pushed down to that SD WAN appliance or to that firewall appliance where it sees the IP address?
Rich: 20:34 Either one. Right? So we can put our device in bridge mode or IP pass through mode where we’re just handing off the public static IP from the carrier directly to the SD WAN appliance or router or whatever the case may be. And so that client device, you know, hangs on to that IP, or our device can do the network address translation where you can plug in multiple clients to it and, you know, it’s doing the routing. Okay.
Max: 20:52 So, I mean, if you were doing it wouldn’t matter so much then if you’re passing to some kind of device that could build an its own VPN tunnel back into your own network and, you know, show up and and be present.
Rich: 21:05 Right. I mean, that’s we we have customers that do that all day every day, you know, with your Ciscos and Merakis, you know, VeloClouds, whatever the case may be. Yeah. Okay. Very common use case.
Benjamin: 21:14 So, speaking of devices that you mentioned, Mark or Max. So here’s, you know, the devices that we deploy with our solution. So if you take a look at the right hand side that actually, the left hand, device there is the RD 50 x, which is deployed in 4 g LTE deployments. And then next to it is the XR 80, which was released last year. It’s 5 g enabled.
Benjamin: 21:36 So that’s what we use for for our 5 g offering. And then below it are the antennas that we pair with them, the AN 20 on the left hand side, the AN 50 on the right hand side. So those antennas are are MIMO enabled. They’re, you know, able to be put outdoors. In fact, to that point, I know you’ll probably ask that next, but, we’ll start with our installations.
Benjamin: 21:55 We’ll start indoors. But we do have the ability for not meeting our RF metrics, and then we can go ahead and take that installation outdoors, for no additional cost. And so we’ll put an email box enclosure outside, and we’ll, run the professional cabling down to the customer suite. So that is available and at no additional cost for our premium, solution customers.
Max: 22:18 What what kind of cabling is connecting the your the box to the antenna?
Rich: 22:23 Yeah. So it’s your, you know, standard, you know, RF cable. You know, it looks like a coax cable, but, you know, it’s SMA adapter.
Max: 22:31 RG 58 with SMA or something like that?
Rich: 22:33 Yeah. So, SMA is used, on our RV 50 series and then we actually have Fakra connections on our XR series. So, you know, we can do with our indoor installs. We do 6 to 8 foot cable run with the RF, where the antenna and the modem are pretty, you know, pretty close together. But if we need to go outdoors, we either do a longer RF run or we use power over Ethernet, with a CAT 6.
Max: 22:53 Very cool. Okay. That makes it easy for an install.
Benjamin: 22:56 I’ll add that these devices are extremely hardened too, very ruggedized, able to withstand extreme temperatures, you know, shockproof resistant humidity and dust and all those things. They’re they’re really, designed to go outdoors and be in in extreme environments in the IoT kind of, deployments, if you will.
Max: 23:14 Rich, I’m sure I’m sure if you tell the wrong person that I have, like, you know, image in my head of of the news reporter outside in the hurricane. Right?
Speaker 4: 23:21 It’s really blowing hard right now. I’m like, did we got the box outside? I’m testing the wireless. It’s working.
Benjamin: 23:28 Bring it on.
Speaker 4: 23:29 It’s working. It’s stable out here.
Rich: 23:32 Yeah. I mean, if the device is actually outdoors, we’ll put it in a in a Nila enclosure. But I mean, when I was you know, like I said, I’ve been with this company for 10 years. So I started off actually doing installs. And, you know, we were doing installs in Montana on a roof, when it was, you know, you know, negative 5 degrees outside and it works.
Rich: 23:51 Or, you know, if we had to, you know, do an install, in a basement, you know, with, you know, no air conditioning and it, you know, reached triple digits and above, still works. So bring it on.
Benjamin: 24:01 Yeah. They’re rated for negative 40 to a 150 degrees, temperature range. So they’re very resilient and ruggedized. Yes.
Max: 24:08 Oh, man. Okay.
Benjamin: 24:10 You know, as far as managed services and what’s included in that, for for our offering, it’s gonna include the configuration of devices naturally, as well as, updates on firmware and security. And then we will also, make available to customers device refreshes as, you know, their fleet is out in the field for several years and grow stale. Included in that recurring, charge is, you know, free refreshes to their equipment at those points. And then we also, of course, are, replacing equipment that breaks or fails
Max: 24:41 or
Benjamin: 24:41 has issues. We also are, like I mentioned earlier, monitoring the service 247, 365, opening proactive tickets. And then we not only are managing devices, but also the carrier connections. So we’re, you know, opening up those tickets on the customer’s behalf, as you would expect, with Verizon, AT and T, and T Mobile. You know, working with them to get the service, you know, repaired and get the maximum performance from them that they can expect from us.
Max: 25:09 K.
Benjamin: 25:11 So with that, we also, provide our customers, as we talked about earlier, access to a customer portal. So our portal is called I Maestro. It’s single pane of glass that they’ll be able to see, you know, a lot of basic information that you would, like to see, like the the identify identifiers for, you know, the pieces of hardware that are out there as well as firmware that it’s running, the IP address that that’s on, and the carrier that that any of them are on at any given time. They’ll be able to see what the health of the signal is as well as if there’s any link failures, and they’ll also be able to see what their utilization is on their data on a site by site basis as well as the total pool level.
Max: 25:49 Can you push this can you push this information into a customer’s own MS or or ticketing system? So if they’re running a ServiceNow or Jira help desk or, you know, what’s popular, on base SolarWinds, PRTG, I mean, like, fill in the blank. Right?
Rich: 26:03 Yep. So with, with our I Maestro portal, our I Maestro portal is actually has an API integration with our, it’s a CR wireless, cloud manager plus system called AirVantage. AirVantage has rest APIs, that we can, do an API integration in, like, ServiceNow or something like that. But then also, you know, we have customers that want to, be able to, you know let’s say, they have a, you know, large customer base, 700,000 plus sites, whatever, and they have their own ticket, management system like ServiceNow to your to your point. And they just wanna be able to open and manage tickets within their ServiceNow portal, which then, you know, opens a ticket into our portal.
Rich: 26:39 So we have Salesforce for that, or we can do an API integration for that as well. So, the answer to your question is is yes. It just kinda depends on, you know, how the the customer, you know, wants to go about doing that, and, you know, that’d be, like, a separate project. It’s not like a part of our standard onboarding. Okay.
Benjamin: 26:52 Thanks, Ben. So, the system will also project what their data utilization is going to be by month end. So, it’s a cool feature. Now we can see what you’ve used, but also what the system anticipates that you’re going to use by the end of the month. And then we also enable them to, do bandwidth throttling.
Benjamin: 27:12 So if based on certain thresholds, they’ll get, you know, reports or, notifications that they’re coming up against their their data plan. And then the system can also implement throttling based off of certain thresholds, like 50%, 80%, 100%. You know, lower them to lower speeds that they kinda slows the bleed on their data plan utilization.
Max: 27:33 So most modern firewalls and SD WAN boxes will let you do, what’s the word I wanna look that You know, throttling or or bandwidth steering based on, you know, consumption or sites. Right? So, you know, if, if the site goes down, we fail over from a primary to a secondary, which is an, a wireless link. You know, put our POS terminals over here, but don’t let any YouTube traffic. Can you do that as well?
Max: 27:59 So if if the company doesn’t have that capability in their application or their their their network equipment, can you put in rules to say throttle or block, you know, YouTube or rich media or or things like that?
Rich: 28:10 So not yet. But me as a product manager, it is on my road map. So our new device is the XR 80. They have Docker support. So we are looking to build out an application to where we can do that sort of content filtering.
Rich: 28:23 However, you know, natively on the device today, you can do, what I’ll call QOS, quality of service, to where you can route, you know, certain applications over certain links. So, you know, to kind of, you know, expose my road map a little bit more, on our on the XR 80, it actually has the ability to attach a sidecar to it. So then you’ll have, and that sidecar is a whole different radio with you can add another SIM. So you can have dual radio sessions running at the same time simultaneously. And then that’s where that QOS comes into play where you can route applications over, you know, say, the Verizon link.
Rich: 28:56 Let’s say, we’ll do VoIP over the Verizon, and then we’ll do all, like, data streaming traffic, like your YouTube or whatever over the AT and T link, for example.
Max: 29:03 That’s cool. Okay.
Rich: 29:04 But, again, that’s future road map, offering, not available today, but it’s it’s coming.
Benjamin: 29:09 So here is the pricing that we have available for the service. So we’ve got, like we had mentioned earlier, meter plans and, fixed rate plans. So on our meter plans, we have a 4g and a 5g offering. In both of them, we have 2 bundle packages that we offer. There’s a premium and an essential.
Benjamin: 29:29 So the premium and the essential are are very similar, in a lot of respects, but there’s a few differences that, contribute to the price difference. And so the premium is, guaranteed with a SLA, a 4 point SLA around availability, performance, latency, and mean time to repair. The Essential is a best effort. Also, the Premium is gonna provide you the external premium antennas that you saw on that previous slide. Whereas, with the Essential, you’re going to get a paddle antenna.
Benjamin: 30:00 And then lastly, the premium also includes professional installation in the MRC. It’s all packaged together. Whereas the, Essential, it’s a self install model. However, if the customer likes the Essential pricing, but wants us to do the professional installation, they can opt to do that, for just an upfront fee of of $389 a month, or we can also bake it into the MRC. I think it adds about $8 MRC or so.
Max: 30:26 So wait wait. So so question for you because you said, installation can be added to essential for $389. But if I’m looking at your price list here and I’m just looking at 1 month, your month to month on I’ll go down to 2 gig. A $121 for essential or a $151 for premium. So on a month to month agreement for $30, you’ll do the installation for somebody who actually come out and put this box on-site, make sure it turns on, get signal, and, connects to your network?
Rich: 30:56 Yeah. So to be clear, on the month to month contracts, the installation has to be paid upfront as an NRC nonrecurring charge, and that upfront charge is $389. Again, that’s only in the month to month. Anything after that, you know, we just amortize the cost of the install, you know, over the course of contract.
Max: 31:13 How do you figure out how much bandwidth you need? So, you know, let let me give you 2 scenarios. Right? I mean, maybe maybe one scenario is, we’ve got an installation where we’re looking for a backup link and there’s an existing something, fill in the blank, there, but something happened and it was okay. There needs to be a backup here.
Max: 31:33 Or scenario 2 is, you know, oh, shoot. We’re moving into this location, this warehouse, and we need to start shipping product out of this warehouse this weekend, and it’s gonna take us a month to get some sort of broadband or or, you know, wired solution in? Or I guess, what would scenario 3 be? Scenario 3 would be, you know, your your temporary installations and things that are, you know, transient. Right?
Max: 31:58 So but I mean but how do you how does somebody size this? I mean, like, I have no idea how much data I’m consuming on a given month.
Rich: 32:05 Yeah. So we have a pretty robust process, on on the front end. So, you know, it’s between Rich, his supporting account manager, and myself. Myself. We have some documents and forms that we’ll have the customer fill out to kinda give us an idea, of what the use case is.
Rich: 32:19 You know, sometimes there are customers who, you know, they they know what sort of throughput they need. But, if they don’t, just me, and and the rest of our team kind of just, you know, a q a quick q and a. It can be 5 minutes or less on what’s your use case? What are your applications? You know, how many users, you know, codec you’re using, whatever the case may be.
Rich: 32:36 We can then get a, you know, a pretty good idea as to, you know, what the customer is going to need. You know, and so, you know, obviously, now with the advent of 5 g, if a customer has a, you know, primary, you know, Internet solution need, you know, for a small office, you know, and, you know, and we’re gonna install the best 5 g circuit that we can get there, know, that that’s gonna be pretty sufficient. But if the customer is like, hey. You know, just run on point of sale, and, you know, it’s back up, then, you know, we know 4 g, you know, for, you know, 2 gigs or less a month, is gonna be pretty sufficient for that. So, you know, we we’ve onboarded 1,000 and 1,000 and 1,000 customers.
Rich: 33:10 We’ve seen use cases run the full gamut. So we kinda just we you know, by by way of experience, you know, with this product offering, it’s been around since 2011. You know, we’ve just kinda we’ve kind of seen it all. So we, we kinda know exactly kinda what to recommend for the customer and go from there. And
Max: 33:24 I mean, from that point, right, if if, you know, you guess and say it’s we want 2 gig and you get 2 weeks into a month or an installation and it’s obviously gonna be more than 2 gig, is that something that you guys are learning on? I yeah. There was capacity and consumption, you know, in your in your tooling. But I mean, is that a or is it you know, is that a phone call? Like, hey, by the way, you know, you should really do this instead, or let’s make changes here and and make sure you’re happy?
Rich: 33:54 Yeah. So our our I Maestro portal, does a really good job of actually projecting the usage, for the month based off of usage patterns. And so with that, it’ll alert the customer and say, hey. You’ve used x amount of data. You know, 2 weeks into the month, we project you’re gonna use this amount of data by the month end.
Rich: 34:09 And then the customer, can then work with, you know, Rich, in in our account manager and say, hey. I wanna adjust my rate plan. And we can adjust the rate plan, you know, in the middle of the month. And and it doesn’t extend their contracts. We don’t charge a fee for that.
Rich: 34:23 You know, we we don’t want to charge over just to a customer. It’s not lucrative for us. We we wanna right size it, and ensure that the customer has the the right data plan.
Max: 34:31 And this applies probably more for people with, you know, a limited quantity of sites or a single site. I mean, if you’ve got, you know, dozens, hundreds of sites deployed, you’re pulling all this data together, and at some point, you’re gonna have, you know, much easier, you know, what ebb and flow across different sites. One site actually comes up, the other sites are off. You know, traffic is gonna be a, you know, very different profile for that that type of
Rich: 34:55 installation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, to your point, you know, a customer that has a 100 or 500 sites, you know, they’re gonna have a pretty good idea as to, you know, what the usage pattern is and and and, you know, it’s we’re not gonna have to adjust their their monthly bill or just a monthly, data pool on a month to month basis. It’s pretty much, you know, you can see 2 to 3 months of a user’s pattern, make that executive decision, and that’s likely gonna be all they need to to to do unless they add additional sites, you know, for the rest of the contract.
Rich: 35:21 Okay.
Benjamin: 35:22 And, you know, worst case, I mean, if they they do exceed their plan, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just there’s an overage fee that’s associated with that, which is on that bottom right hand side of that chart. So the overage is $15 per gigabyte. You know, on our more aggressive plans, you’re looking at maybe a price of about $10 per gigabyte, for, you know, the the fixed plan. So, you know, you’re talking about maybe, like, a 33%, you know, premium to going over versus actually having the exact right plan for what your data usage is going to be for that month.
Rich: 35:53 Mhmm.
Benjamin: 35:54 So, yeah, that’s how that works. Also, the the customer can adjust their plan and and up downgrade as well at any point in time. So if they up it and then, you know, they have a decrease of utilization, they can go ahead and drop that plan with us. There’s no penalty or fee for doing so as well. It’ll just take place the following month.
Benjamin: 36:16 So there’s, as Ben mentioned, just a lot of flexibility on how Sierra approaches contracting and and data plans with their with their customer base. Now you
Max: 36:25 should put that in the slide. Upgrade or downgrade at any time.
Benjamin: 36:27 Definitely. So, you know, just breaking down these plans again. You know, you can see that we’ve got plans as small as 250 megabytes a month. It goes all the way up to half a terabyte of data a month depending on what the customer’s needs are. So, you can see it’s very cost effective, on the smaller data plans.
Benjamin: 36:43 You know, it’s cheap as $25 a month for that central plan, or $55 if you’re doing the premium, and then it it goes from there. But talking about, you know, backup solutions, a lot of times, we’ll target somewhere between, you know, 2 gigabytes and below, understanding that, you know, that aggregates, and not all the sites are gonna fail at a given month. So when you’re talking about, you know, adding backup for as cheap as $25 a month, you know, as even tertiary backup, it it really makes a lot of sense to have that insurance policy in place, and it’s really cost effective.
Max: 37:15 Yeah. It’s not bad at all. Okay.
Benjamin: 37:17 Yeah. And in case you’re wondering, the price difference between essential and new and premium, it it varies a little bit by, you know, each data plan, but it’s about a $30 premium to, you know, move from that essential to the premium offering. And, really, we lead with that. It makes more sense. It’s a more white glove approach.
Benjamin: 37:34 They’re getting that SLA. They’re getting the better antenna. We’re professionally installing it so we know they’re getting maximum performance from it. So that’s that’s where it makes the most sense. But for cost conscious customers, you know, we do have the essential offering as well.
Max: 37:46 I I mean, I’ll tell you. Listen. I have a lot of clients and doing network installations where you have to do your own extension, you know, D mark extensions from Impos, that is a big pain in the butt for a lot of people. So it’s, I I’m I’m a big fan of vendors actually doing their own installs because it just makes things a lot easier for everybody.
Benjamin: 38:06 So, like I mentioned before, we do have a 5 g meter plan as well. So, not to, you know, repeat everything I just said. It’s basically really the same plan as we have the premium and essential offering here as well. And, you know, obviously, there’s a little bit of a premium for 5g versus 4g. Comes out to being, again, about $30 more for a 5g offering, 5g plan versus 4g.
Rich: 38:31 K.
Max: 38:31 But we
Benjamin: 38:31 do have that available, for customers that are needing that that higher speed. By the way, we didn’t mention this earlier, but our 4 g national average is 30 megs down by 10 megs up. So, obviously, every site’s gonna vary. So, you know, it’s not a guarantee, but, that’s what we see, traditionally in in our 4 g deployment. So 5 g, again, with our leading carrier, we’re seeing about, a 150 megs down by 18 megs up.
Benjamin: 38:58 So, you know, when you’re talking to customers, if they need, higher bandwidth exceeding, you know, that 30 megs down, 10 megs up, that’s when you might start looking at 5 g, as a as a use case for them.
Rich: 39:12 And I’d just like to add very quickly. You know, obviously, we’re presenting pricing and data plans today. But we are about a month or 2 away from onboarding some very, very aggressive pricing plans, especially for our 5 gs service. Because obviously with 5 gs, you’re gonna blow through data much quicker. So metered data plans with 5 gs is not the most attractive offering.
Rich: 39:32 However, that’s what we have today. But we are well aware of that. And we are again gonna be, onboarding some way more aggressive price plans for high bandwidth, high usage, that’ll be a lot more, attractive for for for pricing.
Benjamin: 39:43 So in addition to metered, we do have those fixed rate plans or what we call unlimited. So a few things that are different about this is one as a single SIM solution. So as opposed to, you know, the dual SIM offering on the metered side, this is gonna be single threaded with AT and T only. And, while there is, you know, the unlimited nature of it and that there’s gonna be no overages and, you know, there’s a fixed rate each month, There are data plans associated with, the offering just like how you’d expect on, you know, your personal cell phone when you get unlimited with the carrier. It’s not truly unlimited forever.
Benjamin: 40:20 You know, at some point, there’s a data cap, where by which you’ll then be throttled. And so, likewise, we have that same situation here. So if you look at that second column, you’ll see the data plan, throttling at and then the different, gigabit or gigabyte, plans, 50, 75, 125, and 175. Another thing to consider too is that with this plan with AT and T, there are, bidirectional speed caps that are also, in in flight there. So, depending on what plan you pick, there’ll be a speed cap where that’s the maximum download and upload that you’ll be able to receive on that plan.
Benjamin: 40:55 So if you look at the first one with that 50 gigabyte plan, there’s an 8 by 8 speed cap. So if the site could theoretically support 30 megs down, 10 megs up, you’re gonna be capped at 8 by 8 unless you upgrade to the next plan, which is 12 by 12 and then 55 by 50.
Max: 41:12 Wait. Wait. Say that again. I don’t think I caught that correctly.
Benjamin: 41:15 Yeah. So, in addition to, you know, the data plan, getting throttled at certain thresholds of data utilization, There’s also, with these plans, a speed cap. So depending on which plan you pick, there’s a maximum amount of data, speed that you’ll be able to get for each site. So if you look at the first, row there, you’ll see it says 8 by 8. So that means that, you know, the speed will be capped at 8 by 8 even if theoretically, you know, the the tower supports, higher speeds with a particular carrier.
Max: 41:49 And this is a 4 g plan, a 4 g with AT and T LTE plan. Right? So are you seeing 75 meg throughput on AT and T LTE at this point?
Rich: 42:01 Yeah. So so AT and T basically says in order to utilize, our highest bidirectional speed cap plan in 75 by 75, you need a cat 18 device or better. So what we would do is we put that AT and T SIM in our XR 80. So the XR 80, that is our 5 g device, but it’s also a cat 20 and below, LTE compatible. So if you don’t get 5 g, it’ll just fall back to to LTE.
Rich: 42:21 But, you know, if you’re familiar with cellular technology, you have LTE cat m all the way to LTE cat 20. And those are all different bands frequencies that basically, you know, you’re gonna get different different throughput based off what channel frequency that you’re on. So, essentially, AT and T SIM XR 80, you’d, yep, very likely see, you know, that 75 bidirectional cap. No issue.
Max: 42:42 How popular has this been for you with your unlimited plans here? I mean, there’s there’s a lot of, you know, I wanna say caveats. I mean, there is a differentiator be you know, between between MultiSIM and all these other things, but, you know, people people taking this a lot.
Rich: 42:59 Yeah. I I’d say I wouldn’t say it’s, I wouldn’t say it’s unpopular, but I’d say the customers value the ability to use 3 carriers and cross carrier billing and pooling, sometimes more than they do, you know, just a single threaded, you know, unlimited offering. However, there are customers that are like, hey. Need a primary connection. I don’t wanna spend more than, you know, you know, a couple $100 a month.
Rich: 43:21 And I don’t wanna worry about overages. I just don’t even wanna think about it. And so, you know, for your for your small b in business that just doesn’t even wanna take a risk on overcharges, you know, this this plan makes a lot of sense for them. And then, you know, in addition, you know, right now, like I said, we have a single we’re kinda single threaded with our unlimited offering. But, within the next month or 2, that’s gonna change.
Rich: 43:39 So stay tuned.
Max: 43:40 How does the data plan act the throttling actually work? I mean, is this that they’re, you know, effectively dropping you to 3 g and you can’t use a service anymore? Like
Rich: 43:49 Right. So, you know, we’ve talked about throttling a good bit, you know, on this podcast between our our metered plans and then into this plan here. So, sticking to the AT and T plan for now, the throttling is at discretion of the carrier. So, you know, the you
Max: 44:04 they have a or they couldn’t do it. You have no you know, just
Rich: 44:07 Exactly. Okay. But yeah. But that’s that that’s that’s the game that these carriers play. And and that is the same type of game that they play on our cell phones or or, you know, on any of these, you know, small business Internet plans that the carriers are offering.
Rich: 44:22 Every single contract in the fine print says we reserve the right to follow you when we feel like it, and we’re not gonna tell you when we’re gonna do it. So, you know, we’re aware of that and we’re aware it’s, you know, it’s not the the greatest, you know, security blanket. So again, with those new plans, we’re gonna be onboarding here soon. We’re hoping to to get that alleviated. But on our metered plans, since we own the data pool, we’ve already proactively bought the data pool from the customer, you will never be throttled by the carrier on our metered plans.
Rich: 44:50 We we do offer the ability for our customer to throttle, or, you know, or resell our partner to throttle their circuits, via our our portal. Let’s say, you know, let’s say, you know, we have a 500, you know, site restaurant chain, and this one restaurant, you know, they just you know, they have someone that’s watching YouTube or Netflix or something in the back office all day every day, and they’re just burning through that data plan, and we can’t get them to stop. Well, you can throttle down that modem to avoid bill shock, you know, if you’d like to. So we don’t throttle. We just give the customer ability to, you know, if they have a problem child site.
Rich: 45:22 But, you know, again, it’s just a tool to avoid bill shock.
Max: 45:25 Okay. Cool.
Benjamin: 45:26 I would say that customers also offer this plan because, if they’re using it for primary, you know, situation, the pricing here is is a lot more attractive for the higher data plans than the metered plans. So that’s another reason why customers will often opt for this over the metered.
Max: 45:42 So you said this was your 5 g hardware effectively. So you could start with a metered 5 g plan, deploy the thing, figure out if it works for you, if you like it. We go on a metered plan and then convert to a unlimited plan at that point, just go down to an AT and T single SIM if that’s all, you know, like, what it would require.
Rich: 45:57 I mean, in theory, you could. We haven’t had a customer do it yet. But, yeah, if in theory, you could do it.
Max: 46:04 You know, I mean, I don’t know. Like, there’s because there’s a there’s a there’s a big, like, will wireless work for me or I can’t use it or I can unit? I I mean, I still have that conversation with people looking at, like, fixed RF, you know, microwave, like, point to point microwave. And it’s like, yeah. This thing’s gonna work great.
Max: 46:17 You could run 10 gig across these things if you’re close enough. But if they haven’t done it before, they just don’t know. Right? And,
Rich: 46:25 yeah. In in the in the fixed wireless microwave stuff, you you need that line of sight. You know, it’s a point to point connection. So it’s a little bit more risky. Whereas this, you know, we can, you know, take the XR 80, take the a n 50.
Rich: 46:37 We can put it almost anywhere inside of a building. We don’t need line of sight, and you’re gonna get, you know, a pretty pretty robust connection.
Max: 46:43 A a 50 meg symmetric circuit is a I mean, you could run a lot of stuff off of that. That’s a lot of voice. A lot of application traffic. I mean, you can run a lot of stuff across a 50 meg circuit. You don’t wanna I wouldn’t I wouldn’t, you know, wanna push, like, a giant Windows update or something across a 50 meg circuit, but, you know, everything else will work just fine.
Max: 47:01 So
Rich: 47:02 Yeah. It should. And and so, you know, again, it’s it’s the the the bidirectional cap that AT and T, you know, will will allow. You know, as with cellular coverage, it’s hard to, you know, get symmetrical, you know, upload, download 247, 365. You know, it’s gonna be, you know, how many people are in the area, what’s the load on the tower, you know, deprioritization, all that fun stuff.
Rich: 47:26 But but I I agree a 100%. You know, 50 by 50 for a business is more than enough.
Max: 47:30 And let’s be real. I mean, the carriers are running as quickly as they can to upgrade their towers and make this faster and faster and faster and more alluring to get more traffic on it. I mean, it’s so funny. We were talking about, like, age and tech. I’m I’m old enough that I got on the Internet with a 24 100 baud modem.
Max: 47:45 So, you know, I still have that thing where it’s like, wow, 50 meg is so fast. No. No. I mean, I I’m fortunate we when we moved, I was shopping for, for Internet circuits more than I was shopping for a house. My wife was very much looking for the houses, but I was like, oh, oh, symmetrical GPON fiber is in this neighborhood?
Max: 48:05 Okay. Absolutely. Let’s look there. You know? And and so so, you know, I’m I’m one of those, like, spoiled people now where I’ve got a symmetric giggy GPON circuit in my house and, like like, trying to justify upgrading that to a 5 gig service because it’s available now.
Rich: 48:18 Just because you can?
Max: 48:19 Just because I can. Listen. It’s really nice when you’re downloading a game on your Xbox to be able to just go. Now I I come from the barren wastelands of having horrible Internet for a long time before that. So, you know, I mean, I I put my dues on.
Max: 48:32 Right? I started with a 24 100 mod modem. I think it’s okay for me to to be in that position.
Rich: 48:36 Fair enough.
Max: 48:37 Okay. Let’s, okay. I I got a lot of questions asked, but let’s let’s keep going through this. I got
Benjamin: 48:42 Yeah. So going back to your concern, you know, that customers might be worried about, you know, the type of performance that they can get from 5 g or 4 g and if it’s gonna work, and then they’re subscribed to the service, and then they’re on the hook for a contract. We do have, as I mentioned before, that 4 point SLA available on our premium offering. So this slide kinda hits on that. So what that would include is a guarantee on availability of 90 9.9% uptime.
Benjamin: 49:09 And then our meantime to repair, we guarantee, 4 hours on the network and 24 hours for the hardware. And then lastly, for the data rates, we guarantee on 5g, 12 megs down by 4 megs up, on 4g, 6 megs down by 2 megs up, and then less than a 125 milliseconds latency. So, you know, obviously, you know, the the committed speeds here, the guarantees aren’t, you know, changing the world here. You know, it’s it’s kind of a, you know, safe, play on on the bandwidth side. But it’s it’s a blanket, a security blanket that the customers can know that, hey.
Benjamin: 49:43 I’m always committed to CRYOS getting at least this speed. If they don’t, you know, if they’re not able to perform, we get credits. And if they’re not able to rectify, we can get out of the agreement without any penalty or fee.
Max: 49:56 Right.
Benjamin: 49:56 So, that’s that’s a, you know, differentiator for us in the marketplace.
Max: 50:00 An an uncompressed voice call is 96 kilobits. So 96 kilobits, you can have a lot of voice on 4 meg up and you can have, you know, ERP, you can have your point of sale terminal. You just can’t have YouTube. I wouldn’t I wouldn’t put YouTube on top of this, but or 4 you can’t do you can’t do 4 k Netflix. But Yeah.
Rich: 50:19 Yeah. But it just you know, and I’m sure as Rich has mentioned, this is the bare bones. This is the floor that we
Max: 50:24 guarantee. No. This is your guarantee. I get it. I get it.
Max: 50:26 Yeah.
Benjamin: 50:27 And then, additionally, we also offer a satisfaction guarantee. So, you know, the customer has 15 days from the point that they, churn up service with us to use the service. If they’re not if it’s not meeting their expectations in any way, shape, or form, or they didn’t even like the way that the tech looked that came in and they wanna spite us. They can cancel the service, for any reason within that first 15 day window without any penalty or fee. Just the $400 installation charge would still apply.
Benjamin: 50:56 And, because we have to recoup, those expenses there. But, you know, that’s that’s a huge security blanket. It takes all the risk out of trying our service, and it really touts how strongly that we stand behind our service and are confident that they’ll, be satisfied with what they’re getting with with us and and our offering.
Max: 51:14 K.
Benjamin: 51:15 So with that, that’s really all that we had to to share with you, Max. I know that we kind of addressed a lot of questions along the road as we went through the presentation, but, any other things that, top of mind that you’d like to ask, Ben? Or
Max: 51:27 I got a ton of things. Don’t worry about it. Going back to the beginning, when we start talking about CR Wireless as a company, you know, there is your managed network services, which is effectively this, which is, you know, Internet network circuit being delivered via cellular. You talk about being a manufacturer. We also talk, a little bit about, you know, IoT is, like, all the rage right now.
Max: 51:50 So, you know, what what else is Sierra doing, and how do you like, I well, you know, how do you fit into the IoT world? And let’s start there.
Rich: 52:02 Sorry. I was talking to me there. So, you know, with with IoT, you know, it it’s a a giant umbrella term that, you know, a lot of people love to throw out there that really no one even sometimes
Max: 52:12 Can define? Because it doesn’t make any sense because every marketing team on the planet has come out and said that we’re IoT. Yeah. Okay.
Rich: 52:18 Let’s Exactly. So, you know, machine to machine, you know, you know, it is was this was the old school term. Now now it’s IoT. But so, you know, when it when it when it comes to IoT, I’m gonna try to break it down to 2 simple, you know, 2 simple buckets here. You either build it or you buy it.
Rich: 52:32 Right?
Max: 52:32 Mhmm.
Rich: 52:32 And so we at Sierra Wireless, we we make, embedded modules and chipsets. We’re also a global MVNO. Right? So we have a smart SIM, that can be deployed anywhere in the world, and we have, you know, multiple carrier partners inside country. So you can take, you know, said embedded module, said global SIM, and then you’re gonna put that into a thing.
Rich: 52:54 And that’s where that’s where you’re building it. Right? You’re gonna build, you know, a a a, you know, a child tracker. You’re gonna build an offender monitoring system. You’re gonna build some sort of, you know, water pressure sensor or whatever.
Rich: 53:05 But you wanna be able to deploy that thing anywhere in the world and it just works. So we at Sierra are empowering companies that are building an IoT thing, with our modules and and with our global connectivity offering.
Max: 53:16 So then in in this definition, the difference would be connecting a network, a device via Ethernet to a network to the Internet via, you know, wireless versus, you know, what do I have here? I wanna I wanna I wanna have a tracker on my earplug case. So my earplugs are always being tracked 247, and that would be that’s the IoT example that you’re giving.
Rich: 53:37 Yeah. But, I mean, it’s you know, the the world is is our is our oyster in the sense of, like, we have so many different, you know, companies coming to us with this grand IoT idea, whatever it is, but they still need a means for, you know, that thing to go out into the world and be powered by a battery and be able to send them and receive data and be out there for 10 years. So, you know, that is the type of customer, you know, that that we’re that we’re working with. Not to say that we don’t also have vertical IoT solutions like asset tracking, you know, what else we have?
Max: 54:05 Fleet tracking.
Rich: 54:06 Fleet fleet tracking, things like that. You know, we we have those those verticals, you know, as well. You know, those are, you know, easy copy paste use cases. But, you know, the the the customers that, you know, that we’re, you know, mainly partnering with within the IoT space are are are those that are are building something.
Max: 54:22 Right. So, you know, I think this is where, like, this the wireless carriers love to muddle this. If you have a large trucking fleet, you know, and you wanna monitor what do you wanna monitor? You wanna monitor, where your assets are and you wanna monitor sensors off those assets. Right?
Max: 54:37 Because that’s important for you in terms of longevity of your asset, this case of a truck. Would that customer would that fleet come to you directly and say we wanna, you know, do these things? Or is it that they’re seeking out a solution that they can just, you know, embed into their fleet and that solution that’s manufacturing that box is then your customer? So, like, it’s customer, you know, some kind of widget being being built, that widget just happens to be CR Wireless’s customer, or are they skipping that middle widget and do it in themselves?
Rich: 55:06 Yeah. I I think, honestly, we we would go both we could go either way with that. Right? You know, if it’s, you know, if it’s a copy cat, copy paste type of use case, you know, for, you know, fleet tracking with a truck and then, you know, add in low. We wanna also monitor, you know, temperature within the truck or something like that.
Rich: 55:19 You know, we already have a vertical, you know, solution for that. You know, I don’t I don’t work for that business unit, so I can’t, you know, rattle off a bunch of details about it.
Max: 55:25 But that’s that’s likely a a a use case that we can just already support,
Rich: 55:25 and and we already have the solution to just provide to the customer. However, if the customer had some nuance in the in that, you know, use case that they also wanted to to add on to that, then it’s either a, we would we would build on to our already existing vertical, you know, application, or we’ve likely already partnered with somebody that’s built it, that’s using our embedded module in our SIM, and we just introduce them to to, you know, to to whoever that that partner is, and they’re often running to the races.
Max: 55:53 Okay. Rishi had said earlier that, there there were 2 things. Right? So the first one was that, you know, MVS as it applies to this presentation is focused on North America, so US and Canada, but also that Sierra has a global MVNO. So, you know, companies that are deploying and have network infrastructure in Europe or Asia or LatAm I mean, in today’s world, maybe that’s they’re HQed in the US, but then they have these other locations, other, you know, other infrastructure.
Max: 56:18 I mean, what what what I’ll give you a real specific use case. You are manufacturing something. You’re based in Southern California, and you have you’re you’re leveraging, you know, plants and facilities in Northern Mexico, you know, Hermosillo, whatever. And you and you need to have backup in those locations. So is that something that they would come you know, could use a CR 4?
Max: 56:38 Or how does that fit into your port?
Rich: 56:41 Yeah. Right now, I’d say we do really well with Hawaii, Puerto Rico, United States, and Canada, Mexico, Mexico, depending on the part of Mexico it’s in, we’ve had some struggles there. So very northern parts of Mexico, we’ve had some success with, you know, AT and T and just roaming, and and it’s able to provide connectivity there. But as far as actually, you know, an m and o, you know, within Mexico that we could go, you know, you know, 200 miles south into Mexico and provide a a solution, that that probably would be wouldn’t be a good fit. Again, that’s just, you know, you know, as far as finding someone to install it, and then, you know, you know, billing it, you know, deploying it, all that stuff, it’s Mexico has not, you know, been been on our radar.
Rich: 57:25 I would say, though, you know, if you were to, introduce the same similar use case, you know, with EMEA, you know, the the Europe, then, you know, that’s a a conversation that we could have.
Max: 57:36 Yeah. Absolutely. Probably, you know, UK and most of Western Europe are probably a lot easier to deal with. Yeah. Okay.
Max: 57:42 Are all these things if expected to be stationary? I mean, otherwise, you know, so so, I mean, if you’re doing if you’re doing any sort of, like, transient stuff, you used an example earlier about, like, events. Right? Where you’ve got some kind of mobile thing that’s moving around. You know, this would probably be a really good use case for, you know, why you have multiple SIMs in a box.
Max: 58:04 But, you know, are you assuming that customer is, like, deploying that to a physical address and you’re registering and saying this this this box, this service is here, this physical address, or or if they, you know, if they have some kind of flyaway kit where this thing is gonna be here for 3 days and then go over there for 4 days and then go over there and then go sit in a warehouse for a while and not do anything and then get shipped back out and go somewhere else. Is that a is that a use case we solve here?
Rich: 58:24 Yeah. Absolutely. So we we have the those mobile deployment kits. You know, a food truck is a great example. Right?
Rich: 58:29 You know, they they they drive around to go to a location. They’re there for it could be a day, could be a weekend, and, you know, they wanna run their their point of sale terminal or maybe monitor, you know, you know, temperature of food or something like that in their food truck while, you know, while they’re there. And they and they need a robust connection to be able to do that. You know, absolutely. Okay.
Rich: 58:46 And Verizon, you know, works great at that location for that weekend. Then the next weekend, they’re at a completely different, you know, location. Verizon is not working well. You just switch over to AT and T. But, you know, but that box with that SIM with that antenna is moving.
Rich: 58:58 We absolutely, support that use case.
Max: 59:01 Max’s food truck, taco cravings, brought to you by Sierra Wireless.
Rich: 59:05 There you go.
Max: 59:06 You know, you know, it’s funny. I I I make fun of the carriers a lot for this and just marketing 5g is, you know, the second coming, and it’s gonna empower all these things. And we talk a lot about, like, you know, most of 5 g really is is is a bandwidth play. Right? Like, okay.
Max: 59:21 You know, bandwidth is increasing. We’re getting to this point where, you know, whether you’re fixed or or wireless, you’re gonna have ubiquitous incredible access and network capacity and low latency. But it’s it’s like these little examples of, like, actual real real world commerce. Right? You’ve got you’ve got, you know, an ATM machine at an event that has to move because that event is going somewhere else or you’re taking and doing ticket processing or you’re selling, you know, tacos off the back of a truck that probably has a more impact for people or, you know, what have I seen that we’ve actually had to do?
Max: 59:51 You know, gas stations in the middle of nowhere. You know? Like, just just it’s a gas station in the middle of nowhere. What do you how do you what do you do with that? It used to be that you had to put some kind of satellite dish on top of it.
Max: 01:00:03 And, you know, the original satellite infrastructure was pretty terrible, so moving that to cellular is a big one. I’m sure you guys all have all sorts of really interesting strange use cases that you weren’t expect expecting.
Rich: 01:00:13 Yeah. I mean, to your point right now, 5 g, yes, is mainly all throughput driven. You know, the customers that are interested in our 5 g offering truly want they’re like you. They’re like, you know, oh, I yeah. I have a 20 meg circuit, but can I get a 100?
Rich: 01:00:27 Oh, I have a 100 meg circuit. Can I get 4 Why why do you need that? I don’t know. I just want it. And so okay.
Rich: 01:00:32 Alright. Well, that’s good enough reason for us. Right?
Max: 01:00:36 Here you go. Know. I just want it.
Rich: 01:00:39 Yeah. I mean, that’s exactly the example you just gave about your 5 gigabit, you know, home’s Internet service.
Max: 01:00:43 I don’t know. I just want it. It has trickled down problems for me if I actually went down that because, you know, I mean, you have to redo everything. Right? So
Rich: 01:00:52 Yep.
Max: 01:00:53 I don’t know. I don’t I actually I don’t need it, but, boy, do I want it. Yeah.
Rich: 01:00:56 Exact exactly. And and that’s, you know, right now, you know, for people asking about our 5 g services, that’s usually the best reason that they can give us.
Max: 01:01:04 I don’t know. I just want it.
Rich: 01:01:06 Want it. Yep.
Max: 01:01:07 That’s that’s a that’s a good tagline. Right? I don’t know. I just want it.
Rich: 01:01:10 Or or in other words, just shut up and take my money.
Max: 01:01:13 You know, there there actually is a real practical application with that when you start talking about, you know, deploying network services and maintaining network for a business. Right? So, you know Yeah. Business applications are consumed by users in that business, and those users have, you know, work for a line of business and then there’s a there’s a whole, like, hierarchy and infrastructure around that. And, like, if you’re if you’re, you know, in procurement or if you’re a network man you know, like, you’re a network admin or whatever and you’re deploying infrastructure for people, what do you not wanna get yelled at?
Max: 01:01:39 You do not wanna get yelled at by somebody saying, I cannot do xyz because you deployed some junk out out in the world. Right?
Rich: 01:01:46 Yep. Well, it doesn’t have to necessarily be remote, but, medical facilities. Right? You know, it could be a dental office. It could be, you know, an an imaging center.
Rich: 01:01:53 Well, you know, okay. Let’s you know, it it’s it’s a, you know, a a medical office that is having, you know, struggling getting a broadband or fiber or whatever built out to it. Or or maybe they just need a temporary connection for 3 months while they’re waiting on their fiber build out. But they still need to be able to do those massive medical image uploads, you know, to the cloud, you know, after they they do some sort of procedure. You know, those files are humongous.
Rich: 01:02:14 And, you know, and they don’t wanna sit there and wait, you know, for hours for the upload to be done. You know, 5 g is absolutely a a a great, you know, service type for for that use case.
Max: 01:02:23 Can can you bond SIMs for people that want faster and faster service?
Rich: 01:02:29 Yeah. So I know of only one other, you know, cellular OEM, that claims to be able to do that. And they do so with some, you know, I’ll call it a marketing fluff SD WAN overlay. But our, our engineers have taken that gateway, and paired it, or, you know, done like a kind of like a side by side comparison test in, like, a controlled chamber, like a controlled environment. And the, you know, the bonding that they tout maybe was a a few megabits per second better, than than ours, and we’re talking about, okay, you know, 487 versus 4183.
Rich: 01:03:01 Right? You know, it it wasn’t a, you know, a significant distance, on their on them doing that SD WAN overlay bonding compared to, you know, how robust, our our radio and antenna set is with our device on a single carrier.
Max: 01:03:13 And I think, Rich, you mentioned this earlier. Right? So you have, other manufacturers, Cradlepoint, Peplink. You know, companies will take and give you the option to put a SIM in it, and then there are service providers that are using these devices and purchasing packages. You know?
Max: 01:03:26 So now I kinda think about these things in terms of, okay, Sierra Wireless is manufacturing your own boxes, so you control your own box, and the the service on top of that, as much as you can because, I mean, ultimately, again, we’re dealing with with a cellular company. That feels like there’s gotta be an advantage to using, I mean, so, like, what’s I mean, contrast it for me. Right? You know, like, why would somebody go and purchase a Cradlepoint and try to do this themselves or use a use a service provider with a Cradlepoint versus coming to Sierra Wireless? Like, what’s what’s the trade offs?
Max: 01:03:59 Are there trade offs? Are you gonna tell me that you’re just amazing and they should never even think about Cradlepoint? You know, what’s how how does this play?
Rich: 01:04:06 Yeah, Rich. I’ll give you the first stab, and I’ll I’ll give you color commentary.
Benjamin: 01:04:10 So, Max, can you rephrase that question for me?
Max: 01:04:13 Somebody’s evaluating wireless providers, and they’re looking at deploying somebody that’s, you know, purchasing and using Cradlepoint or purchasing a Cradlepoint and buying their own service directly with a carrier versus going to Sierra Wireless who’s manufacturing your own hardware and providing the service. You know, what’s what’s the pro and con in that situation between you and and the alternative?
Benjamin: 01:04:33 Well, we know our own, you know, models inside and out. Right? We’re the manufacturers. So there’s a value to that to being able to monitor and manage it, maintain it. So I would say that that would be the biggest one, and then also just the fact that we have that we’re the manufacturers, so we have access to our own inventory.
Benjamin: 01:04:52 Whereas a lot of these third parties, you know, that you’re gonna have to go think about COVID when there’s limitations on, you know, all the, chips and inventory that was out there. People couldn’t get their hands on equipment. You know? And so us being the manufacturer, we have that at our disposal that we’re able to give that benefit directly to our customers because they’re procuring directly from the manufacturer, if that makes sense. K.
Rich: 01:05:15 Yeah. And and I’d like to add to that. So, you know, let’s say it’s a customer that, like, you know, alright. They they wanna get, you know, 5 cradle points, and then, you know, they want to they’re gonna go to Verizon and get 5 Verizon SIMs. Right?
Rich: 01:05:26 So but they’re responsible for configuring it. They’re responsible for, you know, monitoring it, maintaining it. But let’s say, you know, Verizon has an issue or Verizon has an outage. Okay. If a customer with 5 Verizon SIMs calls Verizon and says, hey.
Rich: 01:05:37 I have an issue with my SIMs. How good of a support model do you think they’re gonna get? Whereas we as Sierra, we literally have millions of SIEMs, you know, with these carrier partners. So we actually oftentimes will notice issues on the network, you know, based off of our network operating center, based off our, our device monitoring tool. You know, if there’s a geographical outage, if there’s a carrier outage, we will oftentimes know well in advance of a carrier.
Rich: 01:06:02 And a lot of times, the carriers are, you know, thinking us would say, hey. You know, we didn’t know we we were we were having this outage, but you guys just, you know, logged, you know, 18 tickets, you know, across all your different business units because this part, you know, of Connecticut, you know, is having issues. So we can then still switch over to another carrier, you know, instantaneously within those devices while, you know, whatever existing carrier is troubleshooting their problems. You know, and then in addition, right, you know, if, you know, we’re providing the managed service. Right?
Rich: 01:06:29 So we’re we’re maintaining the security updates in the firmware. We’re configuring the device. You know, we’re supporting the device. So if their device has an issue, we’re gonna replace it within 24 hours. You know, if you buy a device from Cradlepoint and you and it and it and it breaks, well, alright, you gotta go source your own device and you gotta go out there and replace it yourself.
Rich: 01:06:45 So, you know, it’s just, you know, again, that managed service offering, you know, I think just kind of speaks for itself.
Max: 01:06:50 I’m I’m laughing about your your monitoring example because that never happens that the that the underlying carrier doesn’t know that they’re having an outage before they get told by their customers or having an outage. Right. You know, it it it it reminds me, I mean, going back 20, 25 years, you know, we’d be setting up monitoring infrastructure for, you know, corporate IT, you know, stuff. And and it was like, it did not matter what you did with the exchange server in terms of monitoring it. There was no monitoring system on the planet that would catch an error or an event in your Exchange Server before your phone would just get lit up.
Max: 01:07:21 I mean, it was like the joke was you don’t even need to monitor it because your users are gonna monitor it for you. So, that was always fun. Okay. Cool. So so, you know, my my big takeaway here is, you guys are really easy.
Max: 01:07:36 If we need temporary service, it’s fantastic. If we need backup service, it’s fantastic. We can take and convert temporary to permanent. We’ve got plans for, unlimited, unmetered options that are gonna get better here pretty soon. And it’s a very you know, and and you guarantee service and guarantee satisfaction.
Max: 01:08:02 So somebody can try it and and, you know, invest $400. And if they don’t like it, they can just unplug it and ship it back. Did I capture did I capture all that?
Benjamin: 01:08:10 Perfectly.
Max: 01:08:11 I got nothing else. I don’t know what else to ask. Any of any it’s Rich, Benjamin, any any parting thoughts that we we didn’t cover in all this? I mean, it’s pretty straightforward. Right?
Max: 01:08:21 Rich Rich was really concerned that we weren’t gonna get to the hour mark when we started this one. He was like, there’s no way. It’s gonna take us 20 minutes to get to the slide deck and we’re gonna be done. Yeah. Rich Benjamin, thank you very much.
