Cambium Vies for Wireless Connectivity Supremacy in India

Cambium Networks claims to be in the business of connecting people, places, and things in India. The company is striving hard to show the transformative power of connecting people to the world. Bharat Sharma, Director Presales, India & SAARC, Cambium Networks talks about their differentiators and their strategies for India’s wireless connectivity market.

What are the solutions and services offered by Cambium Networks?

Cambium Networks is a wireless connectivity solutions provider. Our technologies connect people, places and things – people over Wi-Fi, places over point-to-point or point-to-multipoint and things over an IoT framework. Our solutions are designed to enable connectivity typically in the range of 2 meters to 200 kilometers. We have a product portfolio beyond this as well thereby reaching to a wider set of audience.

We have decades of experience in providing fixed wireless solutions around the world. Over the years we have extended our product portfolio beyond RF to also include point-to-point and point-to-multipoint primarily leveraging the unlicensed band. Our products are equipped to work anywhere between 450 MHz to 60GHz. We also offer software design tools and cloud-based management to provide end-to-end coverage of the entire network.  Our solutions are simple to install and manage, scalable to provide the capacity needed and economical to provide reliable connectivity at a reasonable cost.

Another product portfolio which we have comprises of enterprise class switches both in non-PoE and PoE configurations. We are also in the process of building industry standard fixed LTE solutions. These solutions are designed to be mounted directly on pole and are expected to appeal to the interests of wireless internet service providers.

Overall we strive to bring happiness to the end-users and this is captured in our unsaid mantra of enabling Last Smile Connectivity.

What about the benefits of cnMaestro? Is it a product or service line? How does it work in a hybrid environment with products from competing vendors?

cnMaestro is a management system that can be offered over cloud as well on a services proposition. It is designed to be dynamic according to customers’ needs. It offers flexibility to manage all Cambium portfolio over a single glass management i.e. customers can manage not only Wi-Fi but also RF switching. This is a major differentiator against competing products.

Presently cnMaestro is designed to manage Cambium portfolio and we present it accordingly to our customers. When you have an integrated network of Cambium and cnMaestro is roped is as a value-added element, then the entire management mechanism is simplified. For instance, one telecom operator is using our radio on access network and using our Wi-Fi as well as switching. With use of cnMaestro the operator can manage everything through one window including aspects of configuration. This feature offers a lot of flexibility to IT administrators. We offer scalability to the tune of as high as 10000 devices making it one of the most scalable Management solutions in enterprise wireless market.

We also have cnHeat network planning software which uses heat mapping to identify opportunities for growth. With cnHeat our customers benefit from higher accuracy and a kind of SLA grade commitment. It is precise to such an extent that it can guide you to set BTS at a particular distance so as to ensure best quality signal. It gives accuracy in feet. Even the tower height can be identified i.e. whether 7 feet or 9 feet and also which particular corner of the building one will get the best signal.

How would you differentiate Cambium from competitors?

Considering the profile of our distinct and wide product portfolio, it will not be possible to put a single name as competition. It varies subjective to each product line. For instance, for Wi-Fi we compete with Wi-Fi vendors. We count, among the many differentiators, our high credentials as reflected from multiple independent research firms such as Gartner, IDC, and Forrester who consistently place us at leader’s quadrant.  Our product portfolio bouquet is as wide as that we have cnMaestro at one extreme end as a premium high performance product while at the other end lies our Xirrus range of offerings which is into the affordable segment.

Who are the main target segments for these solutions apart from telcos or connectivity solution providers? How are the customers getting benefited from these solutions?

In principle this solution is for large deployments. Thus the target customers are telcos as well as enterprises with large scale deployment requirements. Typically anyone wanting to do a campus deployment or to cover a couple of kilometers becomes a target customer. It may not make sense for someone looking to do one link planning.

The solution works on LIDAR data which is more accurate and it also gives you propagation of coverage. The feedback from customers is that their efficiency enhanced 2-3 times upon using this solution. Earlier their teams were able to establish two links per day which, after using our solution shot up to 4-5 links thus requiring only a single visit to the site as compared to earlier scenario of at least a couple of visits.

Which are the industries Cambium is catering to currently? How many customers are there in all?        

While as a policy I will not be able to share the numbers, I can say with full conviction that the market response to our products has been very overwhelming. This is complemented by our approach to first find a latent market gap and address it with best-in-class solutions. Our entire product range caters to a wide set of audience. Service providers and government followed by enterprises from education and hospitality as well as mining are our key verticals of focus.

So while the product portfolio is very large we are sure that we have solution for every customer. If I talk about the focus customers who contribute the most to business in India, it is service providers and government followed by enterprises from education, hospitality and mining. In addition, manufacturing, oil & gas are also focus segments for us. Even globally we have many significant deployments in the oil & gas landscape. In India from IoT perspective, the focus is on transportation, oil & gas and Railways. These are mainly customers who need SCADA connectivity for longer distance.

Talking of focus customers, what about the use cases with mainstream service providers and the government?

Cambium Networks has a rich presence in the service providers segment where they mainly use our solutions for access network. For example, a leading mobile services operator makes use of our cnMedusa solution for last mile connectivity for their enterprise customers. CnMedusa is designed to deliver more than a gigabit in a 40MHz channel spectrum. It is a Massive Multi-User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) radio and is basically built for very high density customers. We have already deployed thousands of cnMedussa base stations for another service provider in multiple cities and the feedback so far has been very encouraging.

Then the second layer comprising of Virtual Internet Service Providers or VISPs are also a strong focus for us. One of the leading regional players in the VISP category has deployed about 5000 hotspots using our solutions. These hotspots are a mix of public hotspots and deployments for their large customers. These VISP players typically deploy about 500 to 2000 devices.

The Government is another key focus vertical for us. We already have a strong working relationship for the Government’s Digital India projects. We have provided Wi-Fi solutions for CSC (Common Service Centers) in multiple regions. Apart from this we are focusing on multiple SAFE city projects, where we have a presence ranging from few links to multiple of thousand links.

In such projects our RF radio is used in combination with fiber for camera connectivity that is used for surveillance purposes. For example one project in a state in western India uses our solutions in about six to seven cities for video camera surveillance. Another state is undergoing a pilot project in a limited scale. With numerous such projects expected to roll out in the coming future, we expect a healthy pie out of it. Our solutions allow cutting down on dependency on a pure fiber ecosystem that is high on cost as well as comparatively complex to manage such as on aspects of configuration. With spectrum availability in the unlicensed band, the viability of such combination of solutions is now sustainable over a long-term period.

This year the focus is on the government segment as there are multiple opportunities available under Bharatnet and CSCs deployments. These are SWAN projects and we already have done such projects and so we expect to score on this point. We also expect projects to come in the form of Safe City or Smart City projects. Another big opportunity is the public hotspots domain.

What about business cases from the enterprise segment especially from your high traction sectors such as education and hospitality?

We work with most of the leading brands in the hospitality sector in India. We have done projects for Sahara Star which was one of the largest deployments in hospitality in India. We had deployed in the Taj Group for one of their properties and also for Radisson properties. Apart from these, there are many resorts too have deployed Cambium solutions.

What is the preference from your customers between opting for an on-premise or cloud model?

Cloud certainly is growing at a healthy pace and even more so for network management. Certain sectors give preference to on-premise infrastructure. However they too are opening up to explore the benefits offered by cloud. If the passive infrastructure work is discounted, the deployment of Cloud based Wi-Fi is very fast. Network can be up and running in matter of minutes.

The easy part with cloud based WLC is that today you do not have to build your data center. We offer zero IT, zero touch configuration where you do not have to touch access points for configuration. The moment you power it on, it will search the cloud automatically. So as far as time taken is concerned, it is only the time you create your account, power on the access point and configure a few parameters.

How convenient will it be for CIOs or the network administrators to manage the infrastructure?

We provide ease of management. Right from the cloud access, it is as easy as someone with basic understanding of network configuration and management can manage and monitor the network. There is not much dependency post deployment for network issues and maintenance of networks. Most of the customers manage the network themselves. Even the integration with existing network is much easier. We have made it so easy and user driven that anyone with a basic knowledge can do it.

What is your go-to-market strategy? How is the partner ecosystem aligned to this strategy?

We are a partner driven organization. Our business model is totally partner driven. We have over 700 active registered partners and the global base is even more. We have a healthy mix of partner profiles between system integrators and resellers. Based on how much business the partner does we classify them on different levels. The resellers are mainly for run rate products.

Even the work with service providers or government is mainly through our wide partner network. We target mid-market or SMEs segment through national distributors or value added distributors. For SME customers we have a focused approach of approaching through channels or resellers.  The products are made available to end-users mainly through distributors and maybe some through retail. It may come bundled through internet Service Providers too when they sell Wi-fi services or also through the end user themselves directly sourcing it.  These are typically found in smart home kind of deployments.