Mobile comms will displace fibre as both the primary and secondary connection mode as 5G rolls out across Europe, according to Jason Wells, Vice President and General Manager, EMEA at Cradlepoint.
He is on the hunt for more channel partners to help meet demand from customers for comms and IoT solutions that work on the new cellular communications.
The rise of LTE and 5G across Europe means that customers can find an alternative to fibre that doesn’t rely on the same infrastructure, he says. And there is room for service providers, especially if they have their own IP and solutions.
“Our primary targets are service providers in the IT space, and the VARs. Our third route to market and target is with the carriers,” he stated.
“We help with that education for those companies that want to move into that role. So when customers stop thinking ‘fibre-first’, LTE gigabit LTE and 4G can be either their primary link with the Internet for the office or used for the Internet of Things.
"How things usually work is that we become the failover route to the Internet. So if that fibre line did ever go down instead of having all the employees tethered to their mobile phones they could just use the office Internet connection.”
In fact cellular can be a primary or secondary Internet source, he says. “And having the right expertise to marry the two technologies together is half the solution. The other half is the data card that goes into it and provides the network connectivity.”
Delays in infrastructure are helping the change. Customers are not waiting for fibre to be placed in their buildings or relying on that fibre staying alive, and moving into 5G which is gigabit with high density and low latency, he says.
“We're seeing a big transition and lots of interest in wireless, which we're seeing with lots of mainstream partners, including the traditional edge providers that were selling a firewall.
"If you go back 18 months it was a very specialist area and very niche out here. Now we’re getting interest from the most unlikely broadliners as well as specialist-based firewall partners.
“We're on the cusp of something very exciting and certainly intend to rework the partner program. It is dependent only on the growth of 5G and that's obviously dependent on the countries in Europe that are adopting it and taking to it.”