The big interview
12
February 2020 | www.landmobile.co.uk | Twitter:@Land_Mobile
George Mulhern went to college to
play tennis and thought he would
make a living as a tennis pro. That
didn’t work out, so he had to go out
and get a “real job”. He has spent his
entire career in the technology space,
most significantly at Hewle
-Packard,
where he worked for 20 years.
He left Hewle
-Packard in 2006
and joined Highway 12 Ventures, a
regional venture capital firm focused
on early stage investments. In what
was perhaps a sign of things to come,
one of those investments was in
Cradlepoint – although Mulhern didn’t
make that investment himself, one of
his partners did.
Mulhern joined Cradlepoint in 2011
and has led the company to a period of
growth, including achieving a 200 per
cent year-over-year customer growth
in the public safety market for its
NetCloud Service and LTE edge routers.
He holds a bachelor’s degree and
MBA in business administration from
San Jose University.
CV – George Mulhern
The one piece of
technology that I
would find difficult
to live without is
my mobile phone.
My entire life is
just siing inside
that thing. It’s how
I communicate, it’s
how I know where
I’m going, it’s how I
get the information
I need. I’m terribly
dependent on it!
Adobe Stock/sitthiphong
The tech
I can’t live
without
There are bodycams, dashcams, a lot of things
that need to connect to Wi-Fi.”
Managing that connectivity eciently is no
easy task. Cradlepoint’s solution is to use Wi-Fi
as WAN. Mulhern says: “If a police car is taking
video footage, like a dashcam or something,
they don’t always need to send that immediately.
Instead, the data transfer can wait until you pull
into the station, and our router turns into a client
on that Wi-Fi station so you can upload all that
video very quickly and not use your LTE plan to
do that.”
Towards the end of last year, Cradlepoint
announced that it was certified and fully
authorised to deploy its NetCloud Service
with the COR IBR1700-1200M mobile router
across the forthcoming Emergency Services
Network (ESN). The ESN, which will deliver a
mission-critical mobile broadband service over
EE’s network and Home Oce-owned sites in
remote locations, is intended to replace the UK’s
Airwave TETRA network. Being able to turn
blue-light vehicles into mobile oces with Wi-Fi
hotspots will be vital in connecting in-vehicle
equipment to back-oce systems.
The company is also bringing Wi-Fi 6 into its
product capability, but Wi-Fi is not the focus.
Mulhern says: “The interesting opportunity for
us is really less about Wi-Fi and more about
private LTE. What enterprises and public sector
customers are finding is that, if you have a high
density of IoT devices in a large area, Wi-Fi gets
very problematic. People are instead starting
to look at building their own private LTE – and
in the future private 5G – networks to better
manage all those connections.”
He explains that the market for private
cellular networks is still in its infancy, but
Cradlepoint is already working with customers
to build such networks in ports and sports
stadiums. A key use-case is a dual-SIM solution,
and Mulhern gives the example of a hospital
that is currently testing private LTE. As
an ambulance pulls into the hospital, it
switches from the public network to the
hospital’s private network. Data can then
be transferred securely onto the private
network, but when the ambulance leaves
the hospital campus it switches back to
the public network.
Mulhern adds: “These are all in the
proof-of-concept stage, so there’s still
a lot to prove out there. But it is an
interesting opportunity over the next
couple of years.”
Cradlepoint is also playing a role in
other healthcare applications. “There
is this whole telemedicine movement
and we have routing solutions in patient
homes where the hospital can monitor
the patient from home. We also just
did something with a drone company
in Canada, and there are some very
remote areas in Canada, where drones
are being used to deliver a defibrillator
seven to 10 minutes faster than a car
could get there. You can really save a life
with this stu.”
The connectivity provided by
WAN solutions is also being used by
communities looking to build new
ways of life. Mulhern says: “There’s a
small village in Sierra Leone that had
no electricity, no running water, but
they actually had five bars of LTE. We
worked with another company and sent
over some laptops and some of our
LTE routers, and the village used gas
generators to power them up. Then,
for the first time ever, they were on
the internet. Now they are creating
businesses using the internet, building
their own commerce opportunities.”
This conversation with Cradlepoint’s
Mulhern makes it clear that network
architecture will only become more
complex as new technologies continue
to flood into all types of organisations,
from public safety through to retail and
logistics. Agility, flexibility, security and
scalability will no longer be optional, and
organisations will need to understand
what is happening right across their
networks. Given its expertise in
providing LTE WAN solutions, there are
plenty of reasons why Cradlepoint could
find itself providing the foundations for
an always-on world.
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