I was talking with an analyst friend of mine last week, and he said, “Wow, you guys seem to find yourselves in the middle of something big.” That pretty much sums up how we all feel here at Cradlepoint — like we are entering a new chapter in our company’s history that has us positioned perfectly for the wireless WAN future ahead.
While it may seem like Cradlepoint is the benefactor of “right time, right place,” the amazing market position we find ourselves in is anything but happenstance. From the beginning, we have steadfastly believed that, given the convergence of the right functionality and economics, wireless will win in the WAN just like it has in the LAN, voice, and personal communications. Well, the functionality and economics of cellular networks are now converging. 5G is a massive catalyst that has businesses of all sizes and across many industries imagining the possibilities of a gigabit-speed, low-latency wireless WAN. From an economic perspective, early 5G deployments are ushering in a new era of flat-rate pricing models that will eliminate cellular overage anxiety once and for all.
But it’s not just the rise of the wireless WAN that has us bullish about our future. Customers are seeking a “Pathway to 5G” that allows them to expand their LTE deployments today while giving them a way to take advantage of 5G when and where it becomes available. Enterprise IoT has crossed the chasm and is becoming mainstream, and our partnership with Microsoft Azure makes it easier than ever before to build and deploy new IoT applications across the WAN. And, Private LTE is exploding onto the scene — thanks to newly unlicensed spectrum — to address the need for denser device connectivity, improved network security, and wider wireless LAN coverage areas.
While Cradlepoint cannot take credit for the advancements, innovation, and investments that our carrier partners have plowed into their cellular networks, we also know that customers can’t take advantage of these networks without a wireless edge solution that works in lock-step. This is our mission, and we have been doing it for enterprise and public sector customers since we delivered the world’s first LTE edge router almost a decade ago.
As we enter this new chapter in our company’s history, it seems fitting to refresh our corporate brand image to communicate the optimism and promise of advanced LTE and 5G cellular networks and the wireless WAN future they portend. Our new “signal mountain” logo fuses our humble but hungry “born-in-Boise” roots with the notion that we will never stop climbing — getting better and continuously innovating — to give our customers and partners an edge. Today we are taking the first step in launching a new logo along with updated website and content, but stay tuned as we continue to refresh our look and feel as we climb higher.