When Jason Falovo first heard about Cradlepoint, the company was known for its cellular failover devices. Customers with wired networks used them as a backup to keep themselves connected should the wired network fail.
But, said Falovo, who has been vice president and general manager, Cradlepoint Canada, since January 2020, “that’s changed quite a bit now.”
Although Cradlepoint still provides failover to its Canadian customers, he said, noting that there are still good reasons to fail over to cellular, it has pivoted to, as its website says, “Connect and protect your people, places, and things with 5G and LTE through Wireless WAN, private network, and cybersecurity solutions.”
“For the past two, three years, we feel like 5G is our ticket to that dance, as our CEO says,” Falovo observed. “So we’ve been building a platform called NCX that allows customers to incorporate 5G into their SD-WAN and their SASE solutions. And we can provide some or all of that. We certainly integrate with other vendors; we realize that customers are already using different security vendors out there, or networking vendors out there. So you can really take as much as Cradlepoint as you want with that, but the main difference is, we can play in that environment today.”
Canada’s geography makes it difficult for carriers to provide universal wired coverage, he pointed out. And that’s an opportunity to use 5G, especially its mid-band spectrum. He noted that today he can get 300 – 400 mbps wirelessly, and expects 800, 900 or even one gig next year. At that point, he said, “there’s probably a lot of areas of your network you can start thinking twice about: ‘Maybe I can just do this wirelessly’.”
But, he added, “if you’re not talking security to organizations today, and you want to be a part of that network infrastructure, you’re going to be missing out, and that’s what we’re focusing on here. So you’re going to see everything we do as part of the network incorporating what customers are asking for around security and SD-WAN infrastructure.”