BizTech Unboxed – Granite’s Dual Carrier Smartphone

Everybody. Welcome back to another unboxing video. I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Today, I’m joined with Mike Wright, VP of wireless sales at Granite. Mike, welcome on, buddy.

Thank you very much. I’m glad to be here.

We got some good stuff for you. It might be the smallest box we’ve ever unboxed, but could be the mightiest. I don’t know. We’ll see. We’re unveiling Granite’s new dual carrier smartphone. So we’re gonna get to that in a second. But for the viewers out there, give us a little bit about your background, your overview, and just a tiny little foundation on Granite for anybody that doesn’t know all the capabilities that you have.

Sure. Michael Wright, I’m vice president of sales at Granite. I’m responsible for anything that has a SIM card in it at Granite.

I’ve been in the wireless space for about twenty five years now. I’ve worked with all the major carriers. I did a large stint at Ericsson working with Riaz and AT and T primarily.

I then spun a startup called Chi Tech Telecommunications out of Ericsson, which I ran until an exit for six years until I had an exit with Diamond Communications. And then spent the last three years working with a company called Pentai Networks, which focused on MVNO and private five gs. And then I got a call from my old friend Rob Hale, owner and CEO of Granite to come back and run wireless back in December. So somewhat new to to Granite, but not new to the industry.

Suppose you can’t ignore the call from Rob. That’s fair.

Okay. So foundational layer, I think a lot of people are familiar with Granite in the channel, right? But we understand you obviously as you know, you do big aggregation, pots, lines, connectivity, SD WAN. There’s a lot there. We’re not gonna unpack that.

Everybody can kind of can can can understand that and and and check that out for more. Today, I wanna walk a focus around this mobility and kind of what we got in the box here. I know the title, everybody can kind of see it. We’re cheating a little bit. But before we get to the unboxing piece of it, you know, you focused historically on, granted, on mobility data. So why this switch to smartphones and kind of what we’re gonna talk about?

Sure. So the reason we’ve switched to smartphones is a, our customer base have been asking for it. We’ve been reluctant to jump in because we didn’t have something that differentiated us in the market.

What we’re doing with our dual carrier smartphone is really a fourth skew that we’re making available to our business minded customer base. At Granite, we only sell the businesses and in all the other areas that we sell, like you had mentioned, Josh, whether it’s SD WAN, that’s resiliency by definition, whether it’s IP services, we have control and redundancy in that area.

What we learned from talking to our customers is there was a frustration with a lack of redundancy control with a smartphone. And that the smartphone has become a critical part of the IT stack. It’s become mission critical to a lot of our enterprise customers. And we wanted to create something that was a bit more resilient, a bit more controllable and fundamentally different than the single point of failure smartphones that are available currently with the big three in the United States.

I think it’s I mean, it’s fair if you think about the way that mobility devices were managed pre COVID versus how instrumental and connected they are. Everybody’s quantifying downtime. So I get there’s a there’s a different value over the last five years maybe versus kind of before and how people manage that. So maybe walk us through just a little bit further before we rip this thing open.

Just overview of the product. Right? What is you mentioned kind of fourth skew, but walk us through what it is.

Right. So what we’re doing is we’re leveraging our contracts that we have in place with Verizon, AT and T and T Mobile to be able to deliver two of the carriers simultaneously on either iPhone or Android device.

What we’re doing is we’re taking advantage of a native feature of both iOS and Android that allows you to put two eSIMs on the smartphone and have those two eSIMs concurrently connect to separate networks.

What that ultimately does is it gives you device level redundancy in a way that you can’t get if you’re going directly to one of the big three carriers.

That is, you know, big one of the biggest differentiators that we have because we’re creating a more hardened, a more resilient edge device and ultimately that is what smartphones have evolved to in twenty twenty six and give a better opportunity to serve the applications, many of them that are mission critical that are on these smartphones in in the enterprise environment.

I love it. I suppose we rip it open. It’s what the people want. So spoiler alert, we opened it before we started because we had to test the AV, and HDMIs are always sensitive.

It’s kinda like we’re testing it before. It’s kinda like blowing in for a Nintendo game. For whatever reason, HDMI cables and adapters are tricky, but here we are. Right?

I mean, it it it looks and appears it’s just a traditional iPhone seventeen, but there’s obviously a lot going on in here. So I I wanna call the attention to just, you know, they see obviously, we got some bars up in the top there that look a little bit different.

Walk us through what that is, what that means, what that represents, and then we can probably go into the settings here a little bit.

Sure. If you don’t mind swiping down for me, Josh, we’ll get a better view of the two bars that we have.

So if you look at the top left, you’ll see that there are two connected networks at the same time. You see the familiar bars that everyone knows, bars equals connectivity.

But instead of one being just AT and T, we also have a secondary, which in this case is a Verizon connection.

And that is being managed on the device level.

So in this case, iOS knows how to manage the two connected SIM cards and look for the best network to serve the the applications, the IP on the device.

And having it be an active active connection is really where you get that device level redundancy, where it starts to behave more like a proper IT tool and less than just a phone. Yeah. So and and that’s really what our customers demanded of us as we develop this product, and that’s what we’re delivering.

So what I noticed also when I was popping in here, if I go to settings and I go to cellular, this is where it really kind of clicked for me was, okay, one, cool.

I got a couple, I guess, what I’m gonna call a burner phone. Now I don’t have to carry a burner with me. Right? I just finished watching Homeland, and so I’m CIA, like trust nobody.

Anyway, so burner phone is very relevant. But walk us through here, how does the data work? Do I have to do anything? What if I wanna grab another voice line?

Like, walk me through what I can do here.

Sure. So what you’re seeing is you basically are you see the primary and secondary.

That represents the two SIMs that you have installed. So in the cellular data, if you look right there, you see allow data switching.

That’s what is going to allow you to let the iOS operating system manage what is the best network connection for that device, where and where, where and when it happens to be. So as you move between coverage, what it really does is it helps you in a lot of ways. It is always going to be grabbing the best network between the two that you have installed.

And that is fundamentally going to give you a higher level of performance because we’re all familiar with, you know, my phone doesn’t work in Costco or when I’m driving home, that’s when I dropped the call with my wife. Everybody’s familiar with dead zones. What we do at Granite is we look to identify what are the best two networks in your geography and install both of those to allow you to have the best outcome.

The other thing that you have with a dual carrier capability is sometimes the major operators have outages.

On January fourteenth this year, Verizon had a major outage that lasted the entire day and affected millions of customers.

And, you know, the frustration for our customers in that outage, it wasn’t because they couldn’t upload their candy crush score. Right? This was something that they were doing mission critical applications on this device. We had home hospice nurses who couldn’t operate for the entire day.

We had trucking and logistics companies that couldn’t navigate, couldn’t scan in and out inventory. We had one of our sales guys who was traveling to LA and he couldn’t call his Ubers and he couldn’t navigate to his next meeting. He couldn’t join Teams calls. So he had to go literally buy a burner at Best Buy.

So what we’re doing is we’re creating that protection.

Outages aren’t gonna happen every month, but when there’s an outage like that is very, very illustrative about how dependent we’ve become on these devices to service our mission critical applications. So companies in some cases invest millions of dollars of buying applications or developing their own applications to serve very specific use cases that are central to how they do business. It’s how they do transactions at the edge. It’s how they measure, take pictures of accidents for insurance claims.

This is a very important tool. It’s an edge device. It’s not a phone for calling home. It’s an edge device that has sensors and cameras and things like that are being leveraged as very central to the business process. So why allow that to be single threaded, a single point of failure when you have an option for it to be otherwise?

Love it. We got a good automatic on data. We got different voice lines we can grab. You mentioned I wanna talk a little bit for a second here about you’re leveraging some of the automatic switching. It’s almost like a very, very small SD WAN appliance. They seem everything’s getting micro.

Is this just new technology with Apple? Is this a new investment from from Granite? I mean, mentioned Android too. Fill me in on what’s the underlying tech. What what what do TAs need to understand about that? Why did it change?

Sure. So, you know, the question is why haven’t you been able to get this before?

The technology that’s embedded in the iOS and the Android operating system has been there since eSIM technology has been widely adopted, so called the last six years or so.

In other parts of the world, having multiple SIMs on your phone is very common. You go to Europe, you’re frequently people have multiple SIMs. You’re in PacRim, you’re in Tel Aviv.

These are areas where multiple SIM is very common. In the United States, we’ve been trained in a triopoly environment that you can only have one carrier on your phone and you kind of have to hope you get you guess and you get the right one. That’s fundamentally not true. The device is designed to have two SIMs active at any time.

What we’re doing for granted is we’re taking advantage of that feature and where we’re making our investment is the tools and the systems to properly support this capability, not as a hobbyist that you might see on YouTube, but as a mass produced, a mass rolled out, mass supported business offering for some of our customers who are national multi location Fortune one hundred enterprises. So a lot of the investment has been on supporting the capability and being able to manage it through portals and teams.

Love it.

Well, final thoughts then here as we get to the end, you wanna walk us through a real quick just use case example, a win that the kind of TAs can take everything that you talked about so far, put a bow on it, and how do they take a win like that? A quick example.

Sure. So I’ll give you two examples.

One is one of our customers, which is a fuel delivery company.

So this is a company that has a massive trucking fleet that leverages some specialized applications for on-site transactions. They’re using it for navigation and other and other areas.

In this case, they were having a lot of frustrations where they weren’t able to do transactions at the edge. Right? This fuel is being delivered to you to all over the country in an unpredictable RF coverage environment.

And by having the dual carrier and selecting the right carriers by geography, they were really able to limit the number of problems that they had where they couldn’t complete edge transactions or quite frankly, were things like navigation and communication back at their dispatch.

Another one of our customers that is leveraging this is in the healthcare space.

Home visiting nurses will go to a very diverse geography. They never know where they’re going to be from week to week.

And lack of coverage for the applications and the ability to read the medical devices when they’re on-site, communicate that back for analysis and viewing by doctors back at the home hospital.

Coverage and consistency is very important in that case. So being able to really increase their ability to have better coverage, their ability to protect against outages when those happen was a huge value to this particular customer.

Love it.

Great example, and I’m I’m sure there’s a ton more too. Anybody that needs resiliency, clearly, can’t do without the downtime. What a crazy great easy, you know, edge appliance, SCUA, and resiliency. There’s there’s just so much wrapped in this tiny little guy, so I love it. It’s great great spot to end it.

Awesome.

Mike, final thoughts? Anything we missed? Any killer I always love to wrap with killer probing questions for TAs to help them kind of uncover these a little bit. Any final ones there?

Yeah. I I would say the biggest question that leads to a successful sale in the for dual power smartphone that I’m finding is ask about what are the applications that they’re running on the device and how important are those applications to your day to day business operations.

And that because now you’re asking an IT question. Now you’re asking a question that really will lead the buyer down the path of, yes, I’ve made investments in this edge device in the form of applications, the form of business process.

And if you can identify that this is in fact central to their business, now the question of resiliency, redundancy really starts to catch on because they don’t accept level of know, single point of failure anywhere else in the in the IT stack. I accept it here.

Makes sense. K. Mike, that’s all I got, man. I really appreciate you coming on. Thanks so much.

Thank you so much for the opportunity.

Awesome. Okay, everybody. That wraps us up. Mike Wright, VP of wireless sales at Granite. This has been another unboxing video with Granite’s new dual carrier smartphone.

I’m your host, Josh Lupresto, SVP of sales engineering at Telarus. Until next time. Thanks, everybody.