HITT – Beyond the Carrier: From Connectivity to Capability

Thanks for joining us here today. If you’ve been on a few of the calls I’ve done recently, I’ve really kind of explored the last couple of months. We talked about network evolution from simply providing connectivity becoming more of a strategic platform. So last month we talked about that and mostly in the network space, we’re gonna pivot here a little bit and talk about those same themes in the wireless space, wireless and mobility.

So, some of these points will be controversial with some of you. Some of you guys will vehemently disagree with me on some of these points. That’s okay. The point of this is to generate some interest, generate some conversation.

I love hearing from you guys after the last sessions, whether you agreed with me about NaaS or disagreed with me. So please let’s keep the dialogue going. The whole goal here is to take a look at what’s changing in the environment and understand how we need to respond to that. So some of you may disagree, some of you may agree, but I love to hear from you guys regardless.

So let’s go ahead and get to the next slide there, Chandler. So for years, the mobility conversation seemed to center around carriers, coverage maps, rate plans, and devices. That was really what you were talking about when you were talking about mobility and wireless. And those conversations were important.

And in fact, they still are. They are still a big part of the conversation, but they’re no longer enough.

Today, the opportunity simply isn’t helping customers get connected. It’s helping them understand what mobility and wireless enables within their environment. So customers absolutely care about connectivity, but they don’t measure the success of their mobility or wireless strategy based on the strength of their signal. They measure it based on what their employees can now do because of that connectivity.

So that’s the idea I’d like you to keep in the back of your mind as we go through today’s discussion. So as you can see here, we’re gonna talk a little bit about the old world. We’re gonna talk a little bit about what some of these capabilities have enabled. And we’re gonna talk about why you should care, what this means for you.

All right, next slide there, Chandler.

So let’s start looking backward for a minute, right? You gotta look backwards to go forward.

So again, there was a time when mobility and wireless was about one thing, coverage. There was one question that we asked. Whose network has better coverage here? Right?

Bars on a map, dead zones, all those kinds of things. That was really what they were asking. Who has service where I work? Right?

Can my employees stay connected? Can I eliminate dead zones? Carrier choice was incredibly important because coverage varied dramatically across the country.

The advisor’s job was helping customers navigate that landscape. And that created tremendous advisor value for our advisors and the carriers themselves. So next slide, Chandler.

So let’s give credit where credit is due though, right? It’s important to acknowledge that the carriers really kind of solved an enormous problem. Over the last decade, they’ve invested billions of dollars expanding their LTE and five g coverage. So coverage now has improved tremendously.

Capacity has improved. Reliability has improved. For most businesses today, coverage simply isn’t the challenge it used to be. It doesn’t mean that the carriers aren’t important.

They absolutely are. It means that they’ve largely succeeded in providing a seriously solid product across the country. Right? When infrastructure matters, customers naturally stop talking about the infrastructure.

They start talking about what it enables. And that’s what’s happened with networking, and we’re starting to see it happen with mobility. So let’s go to the next slide there, Chandler. Now before a lot of you guys jump on me for this one, is coverage still important?

Of course it is, right? You know, I’m not saying that coverage no longer matters. Of course it does. There are absolutely situations where coverage remains a deciding factor.

And a lot of the aggregators within our portfolio do a really good job of giving you information on which carrier is better in which area. You know, especially in situations like rural deployments, places like transportation, utilities, mining, public safety, and especially if you get international. These are still big questions. Coverage absolutely matters.

But for the majority of enterprise customers, the first question is no longer which carrier has the best map. It’s how do I make my workforce more productive? That’s a fundamentally different buying conversation.

Right? So if you have operations in what I will call the NFL cities, you’re largely gonna get very good coverage wherever you are. All three carriers typically are an option. So how do you differentiate?

How do you decide which carrier to use? The reality is you don’t really need to. It’s all about the capabilities that they’ve got. So let’s go to the next slide.

As I said, coverage used to be the big differentiator. It’s no longer that. I think we’re moving to an era. We’re not quite there yet.

Are still some differences, but we’re moving to an area era where capability difference these solutions. Okay? So think about how customers describe their projects today. They don’t come to you and say, I need carrier X.

They say, I need my field technicians to complete more jobs. I need my retail associates to serve customers faster. I need nurses to spend more time with patients. I need my warehouse workers to scan inventory more accurately.

Those aren’t carrier problems. Those are business problems. Mobility just happens to be part of the solution.

So let’s move to the next slide.

This is probably my favorite slide of the deck because it really kind of shows this shift, right?

Because I think it captures the present. Conversation has shifted from network capability to now device behavior, which of course means employee capability to business outcome. So if you think about that progression, a better network doesn’t necessarily create value on its own. It expands what the employees and the devices are capable of doing.

And when employee capability expands, the business outcomes improve. So that’s where advisors should anchor every mobility conversation, not around the network itself, but around what the network allows people to accomplish. And again, I’ll talk about something I mentioned something I mentioned at the beginning. Customers don’t invest in mobility simply for better They invest in what better connectivity enables. Ultimately, they’re investing in more capable employees. And this is one of the reasons why I’ve been saying for a number of years that the mobility and wireless conversation is part of the same conversation we have with network. The two are incredibly related.

So let’s go to the next slide there, Chandler. So what actually creates that capability? Right? I think there’s three major So the first is the network itself.

And again, we don’t want it to diminish the impact of coverage, but the power of the network is really what we’re looking at. The second is intelligent endpoint management. And the third is continuous tech connectivity. So let’s spend a couple of minutes on each of these.

So let’s go to the first next slide there, Chandler.

So pillar one.

I think we’re gonna go back.

Pillar one, there we go. Yeah, pillar one. All right. Network capability. So rather than talking about five gs, let’s talk about a customer.

Okay? Imagine a field technician arriving at a remote job site. Now five years ago, if they ran into an issue, they might have had to call another technician. They may have had to driven back to the office or postponed the repair.

Well, today, they can livestream video right on the site, collaborate with another expert or another technician, and use things like AI to identify equipment, pull up digital manuals, complete the repair on the first visit. The customer didn’t buy five g. They bought faster resolution, higher productivity, lower operating costs. That technology, that device that can do all those things now, live streaming at a site, that enabled the outcome.

And the ultimate outcome is faster time to repair, first time resolution. Those are the things that the business really cares about. So if we look at that, again, five gs enabled that, but that is really what they’re buying is that outcome. So let’s take a look at the second pillar.

Pillar two, employee capability. Now let’s think about devices, right? Most enterprises aren’t managing just ten phones anymore. They’re managing thousands of endpoints, smartphones, tablets, rugged devices, wearables, shared devices, kiosks.

Even small business, you will be amazed what they have under the hood. We have a I like to use local vendors. So in Atlanta, I have a local pest control guy that comes by. They have three trucks total.

Each one of those trucks has six connected devices in it. So even small businesses have this explosion of endpoints and devices that are out there. And all of those devices need to be deployed. They need to be secured.

They need to be updated. They need to be replaced, and they need to be managed remotely, right? Done well, IT spends less time managing technology and employees spend more time doing productive work.

So again, employee capability improves. And one of the reasons I wanna highlight this capability is that it’s really no longer theoretically. We look at things like the multi carrier SIM or the dual carrier SIM through Granite that we already have in the portfolio. So these are things that have tremendously expanded the productivity of employees.

So, you know, we talked about coverage at the beginning. Now you can get a SIM card that has all the carriers and just falls to the one that’s got the best coverage in that area, essentially eliminating that conversation. Same thing with the dual carrier SIM on the phone. One doesn’t work, drop over to the other one.

You’ve got these things. And these were not even imaginable five years ago. So this improvement in technology and improvement in coverage has really expanded the outcomes we can deliver with mobility service. So let’s look at our third pillar here.

This is what I call the, that’s the next slide there, Chandler. Yeah, pillar three, there we go. Always on higher capacity connectivity. So here’s another example of this from an employee standpoint.

Imagine a retailer during the lunch rush, right? The primary circuit fails. Years ago, business stopped. Today, connectivity automatically shifts to cellular or wireless.

Transactions continue, customers never notice. Again, the customer may have bought wireless backup, but really what they bought was business continuity. And that is outcome selling in that mobility environment. What those technologies, what those products enable from a customer standpoint is really what we want to focus on.

So let’s bring this home here.

Go to our next slide there, Chandler.

So this should sound familiar because it’s pretty close to what we discussed last last month, right, when we were looking at network stuff. Instead of asking who’s your carrier, we wanna ask some different questions. Right? The device didn’t get smarter on its note on its own. The network made room for it to be better at what we need it to do.

So ask these questions instead.

What are your employees trying to accomplish? Where do they lose time? What creates friction in your environment? What processes remain manual?

What happens when mobility fails? And the answers to these questions naturally lead to technology, right? Things within the environment that enable that, not the other way around. So I’ll leave you with one final thought on this.

Just as we said last couple months that the network didn’t become less important, it became more important. Mobility has now followed the same path. This conversation about network and capabilities what it enables is the same conversation we need to have in the mobility side. Coverage became more available, just like we talked about bandwidth becoming more available a couple months ago, right?

Capacity capability exploded, and we’ve got a bunch of different outcomes and better outcomes that we can now deliver with these products and services. So if you remember one thing from today’s discussion, let it be this.

Customers absolutely care about coverage and connectivity, but they measure success based on what that connectivity allows their employees to accomplish.

And that’s where the opportunity is for advisors. Focusing on those outcomes, not just coverage. Who’s better here? Who’s this? What are we actually trying to do here? What do these devices enable within your environment?

Those are the kinds of questions we want to, to ask. Advisors who continue selling rate plans will compete on price in an era where prices are going down. The advisors that helps customers improve employee capability, those are the ones that are gonna win on business value. And again, that mobility conversation, that wireless conversation is the same conversation we’re having on the network side.

So that wraps it up here for me, guys. I think, I’m pretty sure that’s my last slide. Right, Chandler? Do I have a q and a slide at the end here?

Yeah. So there’s our discovery questions. Right? Move to the last slide there, Chandler. You’re not selling a carrier anymore.

Right? This is the sort of finishing point here. We’re not, you know, a carrier and a data plan. That was the old conversation.

The new conversation, a capability and outcome, reliability scale, real time data continuity, these are the things we want to focus on. So Cass, how was that? I know I burned through it because we were on a time crunch here today.

Hopefully, we’ve got a little time for a couple of questions, but if not, we can move into the rest of the session here.

Yeah, absolutely. Actually, if you don’t mind, Graeme, thank you. If you can go back one slide, Chandler, just so the folks who didn’t get a chance to see this slide, if they want a screenshot, that they absolutely can. But I think that was a fantastic discussion. And also, for all of you who are going through the changes with mobility and advanced networking, remember that you do not have to navigate those conversations alone.

You have the Telarus solutions engineering team. They are here to help you identify those opportunities and kind of build those solutions. So if you need more confidence or you need that assistance, please make sure that you reach out. We were happy to help.

And also, if you’re trying to continue building on what you’ve learned today, be sure to go to Telarus University, check out the advanced networking mobility courses. It is a great resource for learning the product and technical side of everything that Graeme really talks about in his presentations and also how to really sell those advanced networking abilities. In fact, I will go ahead and drop those links in chat. You guys are welcome to enroll in them just any way to help you feel more comfortable as you’re going through those.

You got it. And actually just as a little hint So for the next session we’re gonna do, I’m actually gonna bring on a couple of device manufacturers and we’re gonna dig in, kind of take a unique approach. Like, again, during this conversation, I talked a lot about what these networks enable, and really that function is done on the devices. So we’re gonna bring on some folks and talk about some of the devices that are out there and available through the Telarus portfolio, through our carrier relationships, and have a conversation focused on those devices themselves and the cool things that people are doing out in the market with those devices. So should be an interesting spin on the mobility conversation. We hope you join us for that one.