MOBILE & WIRELESS 61 JANUARY - FEBRUARY 2023 | CHANNELV ISION When you’re providing services to your customers or partners, they’ll need the best performance possible. This requires a delicate balance of the right types of hardware, backend cellular provider, installation, maintenance and support. And while there are plenty of reseller opportunities in these areas, SmartCIC Global Services believes a wireless access deployment is only helped by local intelligence and a personalized touch. SmartCIC is a managed service provider that enables partners to design, build, optimize and grow their digital infrastructure. During its 15 years of operation, the company has partnered with more than 1,000 carriers in 200 countries and territories. Each day, its team of 26,000 engineers promotes and assists through-the-line activity, capturing and using network performance data to support partners on-the-ground across the U.S. and abroad. Through its CellSmart offering, SmartCIC enables service provider partners to capture new revenue, serve growing demand for cellular services, and win new and bigger contracts. CellSmart focuses on 5G and 4G technology, offering intelligence data to drive unique fixed wireless options. By pairing intelligence, field-service capabilities and existing relationships with 700 different providers, SmartCIC can optimize installations virtually anywhere. “The beauty of cellular fixed wireless access is you can be agile and flexible,” said CEO, Toby Forman. “We can deploy anywhere in the U.S. in under five days. Getting and processing the order, getting a guy on the ground, doing installation and monetizing opportunity – all within five days.” In the U.S., this means opening up its intelligence-driven approach to resellers and partners. In 2022, the company launched its Global Cellular Performance Survey – specifically examining the true performance of cellular connectivity on a global scale – with plans for a 2023 followup. The end result? Data culled from more than 21,000 individual speed tests, spanning 11,000 unique locations in 70 countries and counting. This information is available as a free interactive map, and fuels both the CellSmart service and its companion speed-test app. “Our partners range from global telcos to local and regional MSPs and VARs in the U.S.,” said Forman. “They want to understand the roadmap to 5G, and how they can monetize it with enterprise-grade services. Our network of engineers conduct speed tests based on their local cellular provider. Then we pull from this research to send the engineer with the right SIM card from the right provider.” In the U.S., SmartCIC stands out because it has deals with the four major providers. “The market will be worth around $153 billion in the next five years, growing at about 40 percent a year,” continued Forman. “There’s huge opportunity. Infrastructure build in the U.S. means there are billions of dollars poured into infrastructure. A lot of it is fixed wireless access. There’s a drive to delivering broadband-type access to as wide a population as possible.” CellSmart considers many factors – RF environments, installation locations and more – to determine the optimal conditions for deployment. This includes the aforementioned research into local carriers and connection speeds. The team also goes on-site to handle benchmark testing, installation and monitoring for connectivity, making adjustments as needed. “It’s about providing the best fixed wireless access for our customers – and theirs,” said Forman. “Our philosophy is to make our partners look good in front of their customers, and ensure the entire value chain has optimized performance and application experience. It’s a unique proposition. There are providers that would just put a SIM card into a router and ask the customer to just plug things in. That’s not how we work.” For SmartCIC, it’s about other aspects such as throughput, speed and latency. One particular vertical in which SmartCIC has found success is the retail sector. Retail represents opportunity based on available bandwidth on modern cellular networks. And this translates to upside. “There’s some exciting stuff coming, based on the RF landscape in the U.S. and how we can harness it to deliver value,” said Forman. “U.S. partners and resellers fight over margins for UCaaS and SaaS. There’s opportunity to make money from reselling our solution.” o For more information on Smart CIC and CellSmart, visit www.cellsmart.io. Capture the Opportunity in Fixed Wireless Access with CellSmart Intelligence SmartCIC CEO Toby Forman By Brady Hicks
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