Greg: Obviously, wireless connectivity is proliferated everywhere, which is great. You know, we work a lot with IoT, from smart refrigerators to even medical equipment that needs temperature monitoring, which is great. But as technology's evolved, we build purpose-built products. One of the big things I see is, believe it or not, some of these RFPs that require this ultra level of security and redundancy. And —I get it — small agencies have tight budgets; I'll see a Mi-Fi, a consumer-grade Mi-Fi in their cup holder. That will give you connectivity, of course. But it's not purpose-built. And so, what routers really do is they're purpose-built, so we optimize it for their environment, in-vehicle. You know, most police agencies, it's heavy-duty cycles, always on, always connected. You know, the good thing is the vehicle will stay connected. You can program them to stay on when you shut off the ignition, to maintain that connection, so when officer's out of the vehicle, there's still a connection. There are still systems in the vehicle that can be operating.
As mentioned, they have these are mobile computers. They're really advanced computers, with high processing power, so they can be doing a lot of things to maintain the connections in the background, or maintain security, so officers don't have to think about that or re-log in. So, that's one of the big advantages I see.
And then, of course, from a wireless perspective, the dedicated roof-mounted antennas, with higher gain, really give you that extra performance. Sometimes, a ruggedized laptop is on the dash, or really close to the windshield, so you can get connectivity, but, really, the vehicle's almost its own solution, and having all that technology operate homogeneously, is where a dedicated router is sort of the centralized point to manage all that.
For your IT teams, or people that understand technology, it's easy to program, and set it up to do different modes, as mentioned, in-depot, through a geofence. Out on the beat, it can behave very differently, so IT needs to automate things, to simplify things for officers. It's exciting. I've been working in this domain for over 20 years, as I mentioned, and before, it was just simple connectivity, and now, it's really amazing the technology that can happen sort of automatically.
Craig: You know, and if I may add on to what Greg was saying about the routers, I come from an agency that we had routers in our patrol cars, and a lot of the times, agencies are not able to afford that. And I'm, now, also, working at T-Mobile and understanding how these things work, the routers just bring, you know, he mentioned the rooftop-mounted antennas that gives you a little more reach-out-and-touch-somebody type of coverage, but the dual-SIM, dual-radio option, where you can run two carriers simultaneously, and that router automatically grabs the strongest carrier in whatever area you're in, that's, I mean, that's pretty forward-thinking when it comes to being very redundant. And just the throughput you get through a router with your speeds, and how you can maintain those speeds, up and down, and the low latency, I think is just a difference-maker as well.
And, you know, conversations I have with chiefs all the time, they're like… and I won't call out any one ruggedized laptop or laptop maker… but they're like, "Oh, yeah. We run SIMs in our laptops." I'm like, "Well, that's, you know, based on what laptops you're using, did you know that's 4G technology?" And, you know, does it support all of the network that you're running in there? Meaning, you know, T-Mobile's network is not one band. It's not one offering. You know, there's mid, high, and low bands. And so, we want to make sure that those laptops support all of those bands, and that's something we can very seamlessly do with these Digi routers, especially with the 5G ones, right?
So, couple things you want to think about is, whether you’re using outdated technology by looking at something that might be somewhat cheaper, but it's not going to save anybody any time. You know, and in our business, we all know that time matters in the policing and fire business. Anytime you can get data faster, more secure, it's actually going to be the possibility of saving some lives.
Greg: And I would say, as video's proliferated, and I've worked with companies that leverage a lot of video cameras, and it's great technology, and some of the analytics is amazing to me nowadays. But the latency's important, and then also managing it. You know, we work with a lot of companies that have DVRs in vehicles. How do you manage that data? Because there's that really important part of the data, but then there's a lot of data you collect. Some agencies like to archive that. Some agencies don't.
So, between the real-time views, that pushes the latency and the performance of the connected network, to just managing heavy data files from video, either DVR offloading or camera offloading, we've worked a lot to optimize not only automation, so that the people that are driving the vehicles, the officers don't have to worry about it, to really trying to optimize the throughput. You know, some of our TX, higher-end TX lines have 4x4 MIMO Wi-Fi, to really offload a lot of data quickly. And again, that's where some of these newer technologies are great. As that's going to continue to grow and proliferate. They're being built to future-proof you for those kinds of use cases.